Dealing with Trojans

"TROJAN" is the delivery method and operational practice of Spyware and Viruses.

Parasite is what they all are.

If you have a trojan... nobody has just one!

Backup your personal data before you bring your machine to me.  You pay yourself less than you will pay me for performing data backup.  My repair services and/or trojan removal is capped at three hours, but data backup is a separate billed action.

Note: Emergency Data recovery starts at $90.  That is different from "backup".

Important!  Is there more than one User ID on your machine?  Each user is a separate backup.

Defending yourself from Trojans

The defenders are changing. Most are now combining Antivirus and Antispy

Sunbelt VIPRE Consumer Reports praised and my favorite $30/yr
Grisoft AVGFree I really like this one. It is very good free
Avast Home Usually only techies know about this one free
Trend Micro They also offer a free scan online. see below $40/yr

Free virus scans online:

Popups

Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. Microsft's proprietary Active-X is the source of most the spyware penetration. Firefox has developed a safe version. The security exposures are blocked.

Windows XP and Vista combined antivirus, antispy, firewall and personal backup

Best deal going  if "bang for the buck" is your thing:.
Windows Live Onecare for $50 / year and you can put it on up to 3 PC's. Also a free online scan.

Next closest thing is Sunbelts VIPRE and buy the Homesite license for $50 a year and put it on every PC in your home.

Firefox is the best prevention you can have.  Use it!  Firefox has more useful user features than does MS Internet Explorer.  Use the very good Firefox Help Help to learn about it.

For email, Thunderbird is your friend.

Thunderbird is the companion to Firefox.

Thunderbird is much easier to configure than is Outlook or Windows Mail (VISTA)

If you install Thunderbird, first launch Thunderbird will ask you if you want to import settings from Microsoft Outlook. Answer 'yes'.  It will import your contacts and email.

Tourist note:

Tourist Note:
Sea Monkey is: Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client packaged together (with some more tools you probably do not care about) by Mozilla.org.

Think of "Sea Monkey" as the newest Netscape-like entity.