Speaking of virus protection, here's a nifty little FREE gift from the folks at Grisoft:
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php
This is a terrific bit of anti-virus software, in my opinion.
I love the fact that it's FREE, of course -- Grisoft makes their money on commercial sales and offers this software free to home users (so probably it wouldn't be a good idea to try to install multiple copies on networked machines in a commercial setting).
It's fully functional insomuch as the only disable features are little housekeeping options that aren't necessary. The parts you WANT, the virus protection -- work just fine.
Online updates are always available and always free -- best of all, always CURRENT. The most recent handles the worm mentioned above.
Almost all new PCs come with a year free trial of Norton or some other similar utility. This is nice, but after that time is up, you almost always have to pay to get continued updates. And, as we know, virus protection without current updates is pretty much useless.
Additionally, AVG anti-virus is very much non-intrusive. Once installed, it takes only a few moments to fiddle with the options to get a configuration best suited to your needs. I personally like to keep as little as possible running in the background and at boot up (with Win98, this is almost mandatory lest you enjoy blue screens). Anyway, AVG doesn't intrude on your system if you don't want it to and doesn't integrate itself deep into basic Windows tasks. When you want it, it's there. When you don't -- no problem. Yes, all anti-virus software can be set up this way, but it seems like Norton wants to make it harder to do so.
Did I mention it's FREE and has FREE updates all the time?
Yes, they DO sell a registered version that enables a few tweak tidbits, but it's definitely not necessary to fully utilize this software, nor are updates ever blocked.
What are you waiting for?