AVG Antivirus is a free antivirus scanner and active protection. AVG is similar to Norton Antivirus and McAfee but is free and does not use as many resources. AVG is an active scanner which means it scans in the background automatically. It also features automatic daily scans and automated updates combined with the efficient use of system resources, makes this program my personal favorite. AVG is free for private use. If you have a business or if you want to use this for commercial use, you must purchase their business version, which is quite reasonable. For more information about AVG Antivirus please visit http://grisoft.com.
Zone Alarm is a free firewall that is very similar to AVG in that it offers free updates and doesn't use many system resources. Zone Alarm is a great firewall that notifies you of everything trying to go in and out of your computer. For this reason, this program is not very user friendly. For more information about this program please visit zonealarm.com
Ad Aware Spyware Scanner is another free scanning utility for free. This program scans your entire computer extremely fast and I have never has any problems of it removing detected threats. The limitation of this program is that the free version has no active scanner running in the background, which means you have to scan it manually. The paid version does include the the active scanning. For more information please visit lavasoft.com
This program has two different names, but they both are the exact same program. Microsoft acquired an antispyware company a couple of years ago and began developing their own spyware protection program. Unlike Ad Aware, this program has active scanning in the background. What makes this program good is that it very customizable for scanning and updating and its free compliments of Microsoft. As far as I know this program has no commercial limitations, because it is included with all new computers. This program is available for download, but it you have a legal and valid Operating System of Windows XP or Vista. For most people this is not even a question, but nevertheless it is important to note.
Mozilla Firefox is internet browser like Internet Explorer, Safari, Netscape, and AOL Explorer. It is open source, which means a community of programmers maintain and update the program, making it incredibly reliable and safe. I personally use this program because it has many features that Internet Explorer lacks as of v6.0. Firefox offers tabbed browsing that allows you to view multiple windows in one browser window, flashblock plugins, a feature that allows you to disable/block flash advertisements, and Firefox also allows you to block images from any server. With all of these features, firefox only uses a couple of MBs, making this incredibly resource friendly. Firefox is also safer, because most cyber attacks are aimed at the market leader Internet Explorer. Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7.0, which adds many of the features that I have discussed above. However, the appearance has changed drastically compared to the traditional IE v4/v5/v6 look. I suggest installing both and deciding for yourself which browser you like better.