adaware
top piece of spyware removal kit

AVG Anti virus
top piece of anti virus kit, integrates with outlook as incoming mail scanner.

Hijackthis
If you must use Internet Explorer, then this will prevent any hijacking of the browser by scumware like LOP and the rest. ANY changes to IE will cause a popup asking you to confirm it.

Startup
piece of software that allows you to control what programmes fire up on start up of your machine.

Firefox Browser
top browser that tanks IE

Opera Browser
Probably the best browser available

Pegasus Mail
Dump Outlook and the other holeware and get a decent safe email client

Spybot S&D
top piece of spyware removal kit


Trend Micro Homecall
Online Top drawer scumware and virus checker/correction

NB PLEASE do not duscuss matters in this thread or post off topic 'I want this' sort of stuff. If you mention software please link to it.

Avast Antivirus - This page links to both free and professional editions.

Sygate Personal Firewall Free This firewall is far more effective than the standard MS equivalent.

WinPatrol A useful preventative tool. It will pointout whenever something tries to make alterations to the registry so you can see exactly whats going on. A warning though is that its quite verbose.

SpywareBlaster Another spyware prevention tool. It works similarly to the immunisation tool for S&D but has more complete coverage.

NoScript This is a Firefox extension designed to block scripted web content like Java. It works on the principle of whitelisting so if theres an online game you must play you can whitelist the site. It stops cold 99% of spyware (provided you don't whitelist * or everything).

Mozilla Thunderbird The E-Mail tool paired with Firefox. A solid client and now has calander facilities via an extension bringing it inline with the top E-Mail clients on the market. It is a comparitively secure client.

OpenOffice.org The opensource office package. It uses the same general base as Sun Microsystems StarOffice but doesn't have a lot of the proprietry art work. It can prove a useful alternative to those that don't want the expense of Microsoft Office. The only weak package is Base (the Access equivalent) though Calc isn't as efficient as Excel.

VMware Player VMwares free tool to allow VM's to be run by anybody. It allows you to test new OS's before you install natively or you can use it to gain the benefits of one OS inside of another. Personally I have Linux installed in a VM in XP so I can use Kdevelop without rebooting into Gentoo. It also proves a safe browsing environment.

Gaim An IM client capable of handling many different services including MSN, AOL, Yahoo and IRC.

Emacs for Windows Its a text editor. Likely those that don't know about it have no use for it but I thought I'd post it anyway.

uTorrent As far as I'm concerned this is the best Bit Torrent client on the market. It runs in 6MB of RAM and could even run on Win95 with Winsock2 installed. Undoubtedly it has the best ratio of efficiency to features. The u is actually supposed to be a greek mu but I can't remember the unicode number for mu.

Welsh Windows - Teaches your Windows the language of heaven

revo uninstaller
anyone tried this one?Revo Uninstaller helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.

Gents, the security that came with my laptop expires on the 10th. What is the best anti-virus thingy to get and is one for these spyware things worth getting, if so what one?

AVG anti-virus is excellent, IMO, and free.

Anti spyware try Ad-Aware and Spybot. Again both free.

They seem to complement each other in catching different bits of nasty code.

Awesome. Cheers Glyn, i shall be downloading both.

Thanks.

I run AVG and spybot.

Plus vista has an inbuilt anti-spyware type thing - windows defender.

does the free avg slow your pc down it does mine or is there something i should be doing??

AVG is quite resource demanding, but my computer is fine with it, I've 2GB of RAM which is plenty for the task.

If you only have 512MB of RAM and are running an old computer, you may struggle and may be better off with a different one.

The light was flashing saying the hard drive was working when I wasnt doing anything once, so I checked the tasks panel and AVG was using 1GB of RAM while scanning, doesnt usually use that much though.

well its about 4 yr old now so i suppose it is old i think it is only 512MB to.I'm using the Avira Anti Virus and that seems to be doing the same.Would it make any diff if the stuff is free or not???

You may struggle with new virus scanners with that little, my computer in work is about 3-4 years old and had I think 512 MB of RAM, it was fine until we had to upgrade the virus scanners about 6 months ago, it started dying on its arse and being really slow, and so were several others.

We put 2GB of extra RAM in them all and they work fine now, it only cost about 20 quid for the memory for each computer, the computer guy installed it. That's the solution if you know how to do that, or know somebody who does.

If you think you might want more memory, try:

http://tinyurl.com/kkcvk8

it's a link to Crucial. It will test your set-up and recommend possible upgrades.

I've used it on a couple of PCs - Fitting the new kit is easy - if I can do it, anybody can.

comodo antivirus its free and it also has a pro version but it is awesome, firewall antivir the full nine.

http://www.comodo.com/home/download/dow ... p?prod=cis

Is windows Vista home Premium, a 32 or 64 bit system? Or, does it matter?