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i dont remember the website i was trying to go to, i think it was www.homestarrunner.com and i spelled it wrong or something and i got a bad website and then like 2 seconds after i had loaded it, norton pops up telling me i have 6 viruses, i deleted them but anyways are there any ways besides personal firewalls that i can prevent that kind of thing from happening again?
Keep your Internet Explorer update help A LOT!
where can i find updates for IE?
why.. you get your updates at microsoft of course..
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/...al/default.asp
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com
keeping your IE updated is good but it won't help if you visit a site that downloads something to your box via activex or other scripts. You can choose to turn off activex in IE.. but you'll have to re-enable it to update your IE at microsoft.. your firewall won't help against these malicious scripts either.. you browse through port 80 and you have to allow that via your firewall, otherwise you wont be surfing anywhere :D
some will mention using firefox (activex turned off by default) , or opera but if you allow activex and java.. you can still end up downloading stuff without your knowledge.
There are a few things you can do to help protect yourself.. (first one is for IE only)
run IEspyad to add a list of known bad sites to your restricted zone.
http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/resource.htm
download and run (as a background process) registryprot. (nihil's top choice :D)
http://www.diamondcs.com.au/index.php?page=regprot
this won't prevent bad stuff from being downloaded.. BUT.. it will tell you that something wants to write to your registry and then allows you to block it from doing so.. thereby allowing you to go and find the bad things and delete them from your box before you've rebooted. Of course, as soon as you know about something that's trying to write.. you can google it and find out what else it tries to do..or other components it might have.. then you could go to your IE cache and delete the stuff from there and where ever else it has downloaded to.
A few other things that will help are..
keeping an active AV scanner running in your background will help
maintain an uptodate host file.. there are host file entry lists available that will prevent your browser (any browser) from visting known "bad" sites.. (also gets rid of a LOT of pesky ads)
this site has a list of places that offer "pre-canned" host files.
http://www.smartin-designs.com
To prevent spyware from even getting onto your box.. you could run spywareblaster (now at version 3.1)
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html
pestpatrol has an active memory component background (called PPmemcheck) process that will tell you something bad is in memory.. this like registryprot will clue you into the fact that something is going on and therefore give you time to hunt down the offending crap.
Of course you were primarily talking about viruses but you are more likely to get spyware on your box.. so running adaware and spybot search and destroy (google those or search forum) are key tools to keeping yourself clean.. and learning to use the hijackthis tool will also be a big help in wiping out forms of spyware as well as letting you see entries in your registry that pertain to trojans and viruses as well as Internet Explorer hijackers. Hijackthis is not a very newbie friendly tool but it's not hard to search google with the entries you find in your hijackthis log.. or you can post your log at a number of forums besides AO.. spywareinfo, net-integration and tomcoyote's forums are the top places for hijackthis log help.
hijackthis links..
http://mjc1.com/mirror/hjt/
http://www.tomcoyote.org/hjt/
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html
tutorials for hijackthis:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/htlogtutorial.html
http://hjt.wizardsofwebsites.com/
http://www.net-integration.net/tools/hijackthis.html
http://computercops.biz/HijackThis.html
take note that one of the nastiest hijackers out there is one called "coolwebsearch"
at those above sites you'll see info about that and a tool called cwshredder for removing coolwebsearch hijacks..
so.. there's a starting point from my perspective.. hopefully others will have things to add.