How to Keep Spyware and Viruses Off of Your Computer

Here are a few great tips on reducing the average problems and giving your computer a longer life. I'm sorry to say that all of this is from personal experience. I'm not saying that doing these things will keep all of the spyware and viruses off of your computer, but it will drastically reduce your chances of identity theft and viruses that kill your computer. Most common fixes are simple behavioral changes.

First of all-and easiest- empty out you temporary Internet files. These include your history and cookies. When Internet Explorer is open, you can go to your tools section at the top of your screen. Open the tools up by clicking on it, go to Internet options and click on that, then go to browsing history and hit delete. This will give you the option to delete files, cookies, history, form data, passwords that you typed in, or to delete everything. I always hit delete all. I recommend this option to you as well. Especially if you use credit cards on the Internet.

Where you go and what you do on the Internet also greatly impacts the amount of cookies(which is where most of my spyware gets in) and other harmful things that get in and harm your credit or your computer. Here is a list of types of sites that should never be visited and why.

Survey, paid email, pay-to-shop, and pay-to-click sites really should never be visited. The ideas behind them are very tempting, get money for doing what you already do and for looking at ads, but these sites are ripe for viruses and spyware. Survey sites take your information and sell it to other companies. Paid emails and pay-to-shop take you to surveys or to sites which have bad cookies and viruses on them. One of the sites I used to visit, My Points, put a virus on the computer I use that would download thousands of files everyday. After 6 months, I finally got everything off that was downloaded.