Make sure you have anti-virus software installed and most importantly keep it up to date.

Viruses and Trojans can really affect the speed of your computer. By protecting yourself against these you prevent all kinds of issues. If you don’t have the money to pay for Anti-Virus then there are some great free software packages such as AVG

Also keep your operating system up to date. Microsoft Windows has downloadable updates regularly, some of which are security related.

To do this in Microsoft Windows XP go to;

Start > Control Panel > Security Center and turn on Automatic Updates.

If you would prefer updates not to be automatically downloaded and installed then there is another way to install the updates.

Go into Internet Explorer

Go to Tools > Windows Update from the menu at the top of the screen.

You can then run the updates from there.

For Microsoft Windows Vista users the process is exactly the same.