Use protection

The foolish days of jumping online sans any protection are long gone. The threats grow with each day, and one of the many tools for protection/defense is anti-virus, and as a sort of public service to anyone that happens by this journal I will list the probably two best known freeware anti-virus apps available.
Rather than droning on with a personal review of such. I will just list them and provide links to each and suggest that if you currently do not use anti-virus on your Windows machine, please by all means click on the link for one of these and begin using it immediately. Also if you happen to know anyone that for whatever reason(s) does not use anti-virus, pass one of these links onto them at once.

Avast (it does ask for a registration, as "avast! 4 Home Edition works for 60 days after the installation in demo mode. You will obtain your FREE license key by E-mail after the registration. The license key is valid for 1 year. After one year you will need to just re-register.")
http://www.avast.com/eng/home-registration.php

AVG
http://free.grisoft.com/

It is also worth noting that anti-virus is of course NOT the only means of defense for your machine. For there are also many very good freeware anti-malware apps, freeware firewalls, which I will plan to also list here.

Please make sure to keep your anti-virus apps up to date with the latest versions and the definitions for such also, for otherwise it is like going to see a Doctor who graduated from medical school say 20 years ago and is not ’up to date’ on the latest medicines and procedures.