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1). Condoms for Your PC
Well, maybe you won't really put a condom on your PC, but what you do need is good protection. Today, that means a firewall, an anti-virus product, and an anti-spyware product. You need to have them in place and you need to keep them up-to-date. For anti-virus and anti-spyware products, keeping them both up-to-date is nearly as important as frequent scanning with them.

2). Condoms for Your PC - Microsoft Patches!
THEY'RE OUT TO GET US - We've all heard tales of someone losing files, having identities stolen, spending hours and hours to clean up a PC mess from malware (be it a virus, worm, a bit of spyware, or a rootkit intrusion. We all have heard criticism of Microsoft operating systems for "allowing" such nasty stuff to happen to PCs which run the Windows operating system.

3). Condoms for Your PC - Use an Anti-Virus Program
WHAT IS A VIRUS - In non-technical terms, a virus on your PC is a program that will cause you a problem. It will jam your ability to use the PC because it makes the PC too busy, it will cause undesirable actions (such as changing files), or it will cause loss of data by deleting files (potentially, all of your files). While it is possible that you will never experience a virus or that you will experience only a mild virus, there is no virus that you want to have any more than you want to have the flu.

4). Condoms for Your PC – Backup Your Data
Backup is important and it is usually ignored. It is ignored until some malware wipes out a critical document, a power surge burns the PC, or you look away for a minute at the airport and find your laptop is missing. Let's look at what you can do to prepare for such a catastrophe.

SIMPLE COPY – Backup in the form of a diskette copy has existed for years.

5). Condoms for Your PC - Defragmentation
Will defragmentation protect my PC from malware? Probably not. So why do it? Do it to keep your PC running as efficiently as possible.

WHY DEFRAG - The objective of a process of "PC Maintenance Management" is to keep the PC operating efficiently with minimal disruption. A part of that process is to keep the data well organized on your PC's disk drive(s).

6). Condoms for Your PC - Accounts and Passwords
There are no 3rd party products to setup your accounts, but that does not mean that the setup of accounts is not important to the safety of your PC. Under Windows XP, there are two accounts created by default: "administrator" and "guest." Since those are created by default, anyone who might want access to your PC has a headstart. They know those default account names, so they can focus on the passwords for those accounts (a big time-saver for breaking into your PC).

7). Condoms for Your PC - Log Your PC Maintenance
INTRODUCTION - For years you've known about maintenance for your PC. You have anti-virus and anti-spyware software. You use a firewall. You're careful about where you surf the Internet. You don't open every Email attachment that you get - even from friends. You may run your maintenance utilities as scheduled jobs. You may even have a script to run your utilities.

8). Condoms for Your PC - Disk Cleanup
The objective of good PC Maintenance is to keep the PC operating efficiently with minimal disruption. A part of that process is to keep the PC as free as possible of extraneous data. One way to do that is to run the disk cleanup utility that is a part of the Windows operating system. It removes "unnecessary" files from the PC and gives you for available disk space.

9). Condoms for Your PC - Use an Anti-Spyware Program
WHAT IS SPYWARE - It is a relative of the virus. In non-technical terms, spyware is a program that will collect data from your PC. It may be merely to identify what programs you have on your PC, it may be to track the web sites that you visit, it may be to inventory the things that you buy online, or it may be to capture keystrokes in order to determine account names and passwords.