Pat, nothing fully protects your computer. Well, except for you, that is.
That's actually a really important point. Your behavior and your actions are
FAR more important to the security and privacy of your information than any
bits you have installed on your computer. You have to have a healthy sense of
paranoia and not trust everything you see. If a bank, or eBay, or PayPal, or
whatever, sends you an e-mail that says you need to update your account it is
a fake. Don't do it. If you go to a web site and it says you need to install
software to view the site, you need to question whether you really trust that
site to deploy software to your system, under the understanding that anything
that it deploys will have complete and unrestricted access to your computer
and everything on it.
That all being said, there is software that will provide limited protection.
Generally speaking, such software falls into two categories: malware
protection and firewalls. Windows includes an excellent firewall and there is
no need to get a third-party one. Malware protection is only partially
included. Windows Defender is an anti-spyware program. In other words, it is
designed to prevent infections of known software that spies on your actions
and transmits your data to others. It does a fair job at that but it does not
protect against more traditional viruses and worms that specialize in
altering how your computer operates. For that you need an anti-virus program.
My recommendation is to get a plain anti-virus program and not one of the
suites that also have firewalls, security centers and what not. I tend to use
AVG's free edition:
http://www.grisoft.com/doc/download-free-anti-virus/us/crp/0. It is low
overhead, has good detection rates, and does not replace good built-in
functionality with poor third-party functionality like many of the suites.
Do not every forget, however, that you are ultimately the defender of your
own data. No software will ever be able to change that. Software cannot
discern intent and therefore cannot judge whether your sending your checkbook
file to a server in Russia is a good idea or not. Only you can do that. You
really owe it to yourself to learn a little about security. I do not agree
with everything that Mike Rothman has to say (for instance, Firefox is no
safer than IE) but his "Security Mike's Guide to Internet Security"
(
https://www.securitymike.com/) is a reasonable start if you are new to this.
Microsoft's Home User security portal (
http://www.microsoft.com/protect) is
also good, but fails to point out the critical fact that you are responsible
for your own security in my opinion. There are also a bunch of security
blogs, including mine (
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper) but most of
those are probably a bit technical for a beginner.
Hopefully this helps as a starting point. Let me know if you have more
questions.
