Laptop Cleaning part two

Where we last left off, we have just re installed Windows XP onto the laptop and just put on the critical updates. Before all of the programs come on his laptop, I setup some of the stuff to protect the computer. Just like a person getting ready to leave the house, you must get your computer ready to go online and offline.
When a person catches a cold or a virus, they must treat it with the right medicine. The computer is the same thing, when it catches a virus from an email attachment from an unknown source, an infected friend from their address book or corrupted program. Using the commercial Anti-virus such as McAffee or Norton could help your system but when you need an update for the new virus, they will be limited with the time. Also, there are some holes in the system that an outside hacker can turn off and leave you vulnerable. There is some excellent free antivirus software but the one I like is AntiVir. It is simple and the updates come every two weeks. I suggest that using the antivirus every month to check for foreign agents on your computer.
Windows XP SP2 has a good firewall for the protection that you may need but you might have to update your Windows if you are working with SP1 at their website or pressing Windows Update.
For a good spyware program; I chosen Ad-Aware. Ad-Aware provides advanced protection from known data-mining, aggressive advertising, Trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, and tracking components.
Disk fragmentation causes crashes, slowdowns, freeze-ups and even total system failures. The number one reason for performance bottlenecks is fragmentation. Even the best hardware will eventually slow down unless the drive is defragmented daily. Diskeeper, from Executive Software, could be the best third party disk defrag program. Comparing it to the regular bundle with Windows XP, this is far superior.
I went to Snap-Files website to download a great disk cleaner because, the one bundle with Windows is good but slow.
Finally, with pop up ads on the rise, I completely change my browser to Mozilla Firefox. Besides it has a built in pop up blocker (doesn’t work on aggressive pop up banner), it does tab browsing. In short, you can open up many websites on one browser. I still have to keep IE, cause of the updates and certain websites that can not conform to Firefox.
After all the updates and fixes to his laptop, the only thing he would have to worry is getting off dial up and go to DSL or Broadband for his internet actions, but that’s another problem all together.