PC Security and Stability tips

If your office has an always-on Internet connection, use ZoneAlarm’s Internet Lock feature to protect your machine in your absence. To enable this, rightclick on the ZoneAlarm icon in the system tray and choose ‘Restore ZoneAlarm Control Centre’. Then click on the Lock tab. The Internet Lock is disabled by default. Click on Enable. Now specify a delay time of 20 minutes.
Next, check the High Security option.
This will stop all Internet activity if the machine remains idle for more than 20 minutes. E-mail protection with Norton Antivirus If you are using an e-mail client to access your POP mail account(s), then you could set up Norton AntiVirus to scan all incoming mail. To do this, start Norton AntiVirus and open the Options window.
In the left pane, browse down to the E-Mail Protection sub-menu under the Internet menu.Next, select the e-mail accounts you want scanned before the mail is downloaded on to your hard disk. Finally,from the Action tab, specify the action to be taken in case a mail is infected by a virus and press OK to complete the configuration.
If you have Norton Personal Firewall, then you can also block ActiveX controls and other cookies. A unique feature of Norton is that it can also block advertisements and HTTP referrers (wherein a site comes to know where you are coming from).
Importance of Live Updates By default, Live Update is configured to look for updates every time you connect to the Internet irrespective of whether or not updates have been released. This can
be very annoying. You can change the default setting to download updates only when a newer version is available.
To do this, browse to the LiveUpdate menu under Internet in the Norton AntiVirus Options dialog box.By default, the ‘Apply updates without interrupting me’ option is checked. Change the default option by ticking the check box against ‘Notify me when updates are available’ and press OK. Scanning all downloads in FlashGet You can set up your download manager to scan files before they are downloaded.
To configure FlashGet, start FlashGet and open the Options window from the Tools Menu.Once there, click on the File Manager tab and tick the check box against the ‘Use virus scanner to scan the downloaded files’ and browse to the folder where your antivirus program is stored.