Think I've done something wrong!

s4mmy

My sons are always telling me that I should have better protection against viruses and other such things and so I attempted to download AVG. However I must heve done something wrong as now we can't access Hotmail or other secure sites. One of my friends has suggested that the computer has a virus which has changed some of the settings. As I know nothing about computers can anyone please help -I have already used system restore to get me back to before I downloaded this programme but no luck.

angelavdavis

Look at your settings in IE (tools, internet options, security tab, custom level) and check that active scripting has been enabled.

bookduck

An alternative recommendation: If you want reliability, just type letters, surf - no 3d games games or bespoke or essential programs, there are excellent ways to get security for free out there, however there is also a steep learning curve associated with it and many people will not go down this route.

Granted windows works well, but I feel these days it is like buying a sieve to store water and all you ever do is go around patching the thing up, getting virus updates, ie patches, web page hacks, spy checkers fixing things that should have worked in the first place, etc.

The answer is to get a secure operating system. The most secure is the Apple one (no os X- unix one, but the older one), but for this you obviously need an Apple, and also is not free. Not far behind these are the unix FreeBSD and other BSD/unix equivalents, Then there is Linux which is about 3rd place. Many Unix type systems work for years without virus checkers installed, but there are free ones, you probably wont get any spy ware, it will be much faster. No special activation codes or validation, norton subscriptions, very few - if any email viruses will effect you.

I had a 450Mhz 128Meg ram old laptop given to me and I put the free PC BSD on it and it seems to work as well if not better as my 1.7MHz 1G ram desktop. For banking and on line accounts, you cant beat it! I'm hoping to go down this route over the next month. Once installed, it just sits and works.

So before you dispose of your old PC this christmas, just download the latest release of ubuntu or PCBSD, both cost nothing and are fairly easy to install, the networking side is a bit trickier than windows, but not by much

joshm_2

You could take a look here to see if any of their advice helps:

http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/secure.htm