Protect Your PC

Your home is your castle, and your virtual home--your PC--should feel just as secure. However, protecting both requires vigilance against a multitude of intruders ranging from the merely annoying to the truly dangerous. Just as you must guard against miscreants breaking into your house or office to vandalize and plunder it, you must repel viruses and hackers trying to slip into your PC to wreak havoc and filch valuable personal or company data. And just as telemarketers can disturb your dinner, stealthware-laden downloads and endless spam e-mail can ruin your appetite for going online.

You can protect your PC as you do your home or office, with a combination of strategy and the right tools. In this article we report on the dangers threatening your system and recap the results of our extensive performance testing and hands-on evaluations. Our findings will help you choose the best utilities for your PC-protection tool kit: antivirus, firewall, and antistealthware programs that lock out intruders; and antispam software and services that deflect the slings and arrows of outrageous e-mail marketing tactics.