Five simple steps to keep your home PC secure

Having a PC at home is nothing new. And having a PC at home with a plain normal modem to connect with Internet was a trendy habit some years ago. But now the trend is called DSL, especially the flat rate DSL, in whichever flavour marketed by the different providers.
A DSL connection uses the pair of external cables that for ages have linked your home with the nearest public phone exchange branch. The only distinctive thing about DSL is that the telecommunications provider has to install a “special modem“ at both ends of the line. With these two modems, you can transmit data much faster (for those willing to go a little bit deeper, this new speed has to do with the way the digital data modulation is performed). This is what we call bandwidth. By whatever means, a DSL connection has arrived at your home and, oh surprise, your family home PC is already connected to the DSL modem/router!
The increasing time that your home PC is connected and running, the fact that most
of us use the same operating system and the same applications at home (Windows XP and MS Office) and the speed of this connection create a scenario in which your PC is an easy target for all kinds of disruptive pieces of code coming from the Internet in many different forms: an e-mail from a friend, a piece of code silently downloaded
using your Internet browser, etc.
The time that you could spend repairing your home PC and trying to recover your valuable data makes the content of this ar ticle (or series of ar ticles) somehow
worthy.
There are five easy security measures to protect your home PC (and eventually to save you time in front of the screen of a “hacked“ or “infected“ PC).
1. Keep your operating system updated (nowadays this is really easy through automated
ways).
2. Install antivirus software (there are free ones such as Clamwin).
3. Install a personal firewall (there are free versions available for home use, for example Kerio Personal Firewall). This increases dramatically your security when browsing the Internet.
4. Install an anti-malware or anti-adware software, such as Spybot.
5. And finally, very importantly, make a copy of all valuable data in another media (a CD Rom or DVD) just in case your hard disk stops working unexpectedly.

These five security measures are not the golden solution to 100% security (by the way, there is never a 100% scenario in any field), but the likelihood of you spending a whole sunny weekend in front of the screen of your family’s PC trying to rescue
it from a virus or something similar should be a little bit lower.