An off-site backup service like BackBlaze! This is the program your computer needs the moment it gets online. Why is an off-site backup service like BackBlaze so important? Because the moment you can answer 'yes' to the question, "do you have anything of importance on your computer worth more than the $50 per year cost of recovering it?
Of course you need antivirus but the days of paying for antivirus subscriptions each year you can opt for the free versions like Avast, which I use and recommend, or AVG which I have found to be a bit bloated and more intrusive with regards to pushing the professional products a little much, not to mention on more then one occasion after removing it for Avast and performing a full virus scan, Avast has found things that AVG missed.
Lose the Internet Explorer Browser. Well, not actually delete it, although since Windows 7 you can now turn off the internet explorer, but as I have learned, the moment you do this, if you ever use any other Microsoft product such as "office" then you are going to have many errors as a direct result of the disabling of the Internet Explorer, therefore my suggestion is to simply delete the shortcuts and program icons wherever you see them and install at least one internet explorer-based web browser. You may ask, "But why is it so important to not use the Internet Explorer?" At the point of this writing (January 2012) My answer would be because there is still the majority of security problems, malware, spyware programs that are getting installed on any given computer, whenever the Internet Explorer is used, even opened... and that is because there are so many 'trial ware' sources out there, that will place a small pop up or 'toolbar' on the Internet Explorer when you first launch the program. This comes with every computer! Yes, the latest version of the Internet Explorer (version 9 as this is written) is 100 percent better than version 8, which was by far the worst! The problem is on older Windows XP machines, you can only get to version 8 so you are actually better to stay with version 7! But now with the latest automatic roll up to the latest version, which means if you have the automatic updates turned on, on your XP machine, you will get version 8 automatically.. which you can then uninstall and roll back to version 7. But should you do this? Yes, absolutely, because unfortunately with the way Microsoft likes to deal with security versus performance, they seem to figure we all have quad-core (or better) processors and loads of memory that can handle all the additional processes this program uses. The fact is, we are trying to keep it simple here.. just move on, since you are going to be using Chrome anyway!
More on that later, but first..
What you need is an internet web browser that can act like it is the internet explorer without being the internet explorer and my choice for this is the AVANT BROWSER. This browser emulates the Internet Explorer exactly, which means when you visit a website, it thinks you are using the Internet Explorer which means it will display the same way. Therefore if you do get an error message while using it, such as a java update is necessary or an adobe reader update... this is pretty typical and yes, you should update these.
But I'll get in to optimizing stuff much later, first you need to start surfing the web and downloading a few programs to help keep your system working smoothly.. so you need the safest, fastest web browser out there (currently) and that would be the Google Chrome Browser.
It is more important to find the best web browser as it is your main tool while surfing the internet and right now, that would be the GOOGLE CHROME Web Browser.
This means that you should:
1: install Avant Browser and
2: install Chrome.
Why in that order? Because when you first install Avant and if you use the typical install method, it will prompt you if you want to make it the default web browser and you can say 'yes' to this. This will then change all of the defaults away from the Internet Explorer and direct them to the Avant Browser (which by default, emulates the Internet Explorer but you can have it emulate others if you go in to the options-- no need to as you will be installing Chrome next).. and yes, time to install Chrome. Once installed, you will then go to it's options and make it the default browser. This changes some things, but others will still open in Avant, which would open with the Internet Explorer if you didn't have Avant installed, and the entire reason for installing Avant is so that you NEVER have to open the Internet Explorer... so then you ask, "but why is the Internet Explorer so bad?"
