Before we start this guide you must be willing to learn. We will cover a lot of topics in this and they are all for your own good. Some get a little advanced and technical but most of these aren't really required in less your doing a lot things that need a lot of security. Also remember this guide is to help even with everything we tell you if you do stupid things your information can still be stolen(like post your social security number every where or not checking that your on the site that actually sent the email).
There will probably be a lot of things you'll need to install. Everything we recommend(and provide a link to) will be virus and spy/adware free. We will also try and keep an up to date collection of all the software we recommend(the ones we can redistribute anyway). So if you don't feel safe downloading from the main site(even though you should as it is always the latest) you can get from us where everything will be scanned by at least one antivirus program.
So we'll begin with some essential things that you should never browse the internet without.
We'll start with 3 basic things you should always have when browsing the internet.
It's either impossible to do it without these or very unsafe.
Now I can guarantee anyone with any decent knowledge of the internet maybe be able to skip this but just to be safe skim it as even you may learn something.
This is the most essential thing to your web browsing. As well with out it the internet would be a very boring place. The web browser is what takes all the code and makes it look like what you see. I can't really explain it any more simple I guess.
We'll be covering the big 3 in this guide then listing some others as there are now many. Many people choose different browsers for different reasons. Each has their own advantages.
So we'll begin with Windows Default(Internet Explorer).
Now the second most popular web browser out there. Fire Fox has been known for it's fast browsing, better security, and high customization due to the amount of extensions that are available.
Some the more popular features in FF(Fire Fox) are tabbed browsing(which it had well before IE) and better security record than IE. There is also the almighty extensions which adds a whole new playing field to the browser battle.
With extensions your able to get instant updates on local weather, and block 99.9% of ads. There is tons more but most of my personal add-ons are for specific things. But there is a huge database and few I would have to say are a must are...
Adblock Plus
Download Statusbar
I know it's only 2 but they are just ones I would recommend to anyone no matter what. You can see all the add-ons available at Mozilla's Add-on Section.
Finally you can get the latest version of Fire Fox from Mozilla.
I got a feeling if your actually reading this part of the guide you are most likely using this in less you have a techy friend. But this is still the most widely used browser world wide so we have to cover it.
IE(Internet Explorer) is the web browser developed by Microsoft to allow it's windows 95 user browse the internet. It has since become a pretty nice browser with IE 7 and IE 8 in beta testing right now.
The best thing about IE is that it will most likely start up the fastest of any browser since most of it's process requirements are always running in the background. Also with IE 7 it now has tabbed browsing allowing you to have more than one site open in one window. It used to be known for many security flaws but they are begging to fix these problems.
Then probably the biggest advantage to IE is that some sites will only allow you to use IE as it has some HTML codes that no other browsers will work with. Now this also probably it's biggest flaw. As many web developers no longer like IE as most of it's users don't take the time to update it and well it just makes keeping up with all the new options.
So this goes for any software make sure you use the latest version! And you can get the latest version of Internet Explorer from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx