Muggles Guide - New PC? What to do first.

Your new PC has just arrived... you are all excited and looking forward to playing with it.

But it is VITALLY important that you take some basic precautions BEFORE connecting it to the internet.

1. Install a firewall. Windows XP already comes with a basic firewall, some people prefer to upgrade to a commercial solution. There are also some free versions that are worth considering.
2. Install anti-virus software. I've seen computers become infected by viruses with minutes of first browsing the internet! Thats not a joke or an exageration. Currently Windows XP does not come with any anti-virus software. As with firewalls there are both commercial and free versions available.
3. Install all the official patches for Windows from Microsoft.
4. Think about how to do backups.

If possible install firewall and anti-virus software before connecting to the internet. Perhaps go to a local shop and buy a boxed copy. It may be that your PC came with something pre-installed.

If not you will have to download at least the anti-virus software and a maybe a firewall from a website.  Since you are using a still vulnerable machine take the following precautions:

• Only visit safe sites such as this one and the software download sites listed below. Do NOT visit any other websites! It may be that your Internet Explorer or FireFox is setup to automatically connect you to a website such as the Microsoft home page, or the home page of your Internet company, or perhaps to the company who made your PC. This is unavoidable but do NOT click on any links on that site and move quickly along to downloading software.
• Do NOT use email of any kind yet. No Outlook, no Outlook Express, no Hotmail, no Gmail, no Eudora, No thunderbird, no ... well you get the point
• Do NOT use any chat program of any kind yet. No MSN, no Yahoo Messenger, no AOL, no ICQ, no ... and I'm sure you get the point here too!

Whats Available? 

There are a number of commercial firewalls and anti-virus packages available. Some are combined into an all-in-one system.

On my main Windows XP laptop I run: Norton Internet Security which combines firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam... I mostly use it because Norton it has a good reputation, it came with my laptop and it interworks properly with all my other software.

As I mentioned before a computer can be infected quickly once connected to the internet. A friend immigrated to Spain. Their PC took months to arrive. Once connected the machine became infected BEFORE the anti-virus had a chance to update itself!! Worse still the virus kept disabling the anti-virus software! In the end they had to uninstall the old software and upgrade to a new package. I recommend they used: Panda Internet Security as I've found it to be very effective at clearing out already infected PCs.

On my older test laptop, also running Windows XP, I use the Windows XP firewall and AVG Free anti-virus. In the past I've used the free firewall from ZoneAlarm (see the downloads page on their site for the free version. However I found ZoneAlarm fought with the BlueTooth hardware so much I had to remove ZoneAlarm!

The AVG Free basic anti-virus is a simple package with a number of limitations but seems to work fine for me and several of my friends run it and report no problems.

"The Wizard"