[natakudragoon]

i just helped my gf get a hp laptop with vista home premium installed. im planning to put antivirus, antispyware and a firewall. wat good programs are recommended? are there different versions of programs i need to use for vista as opposed to xp, say like spyware blaster.

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For anti-virus/spyware, I just use AVG 8, and Ad-aware 2007, both available for free at download.com.
And Vista has a built in firewall, I've never used a 3rd party firewall, but I see nothing wrong with Vista's. (Vista also has a virus scanner-defender- but I find it rather useless)

[skeddles]

For anti-virus/spyware, I just use AVG 8, and Ad-aware 2007, both available for free at download.com.
And Vista has a built in firewall, I've never used a 3rd party firewall, but I see nothing wrong with Vista's. (Vista also has a virus scanner-defender- but I find it rather useless)

[Broni]

Unfortunately AVG 8.0 has been having number of issues since introduced. It looks like its creator, Grisoft has been doing pretty good effort to correct issues, but I would wait with installing AVG.
There are couple of other free, and very good AV programs:
- Avira free antivirus: http://www.free-av.c...load/index.html
- Avast! free antivirus: http://filehippo.com...vast_antivirus/

As for firewall, many people just stay with built-in Vista firewall. The only problem with it is, that despite being advertised by Micro$oft as two-way firewall, it's practically only one way firewall, protecting you from inbound traffic. This IS the most important direction of computer traffic, but if you want good, free firewall, go for Comodo: http://www.personalf...all.comodo.com/