As others have mentioned, you should have more than one anti-spyware product installed, as no one product catches more than 65% of the current malware in circulation. You also should have a backup plan in place and running; I strongly recommend a separate, external hard drive for this purpose, as saving your backups to a local drive doesn't do you much good when the system crashes completely. Something no one else has mentioned, though, is to have a plan in place for handling future growth. As you use your computer, it's going to get cluttered, and it will eventually become impossible to find things. Set up a plan to organize things on your computer, then stick to it. For starters, reserve a healthy chunk of disk space for Windows; it needs a bunch, and it never stops growing, even when you tell a program to install itself somewhere else. Second, reserve a space for programs and always install them in that space. All programs seem to think you want them in the C:\Program Files directory, and that will eventually kill your computer. Lastly, save a space dedicated to your data - your documents, financial files, pictures, videos, etc. Then remember to change the default locations for data used by all of your installed programs to point to that dedicated space. Most programs, again, think you want all of their data saved on the C: drive, and you have to force them to save stuff elsewhere. My reason for all this is that, when you eventually have to reinstall Windows when it crashes, if you let things go with their defaults you will lose them all. Keeping all your data separate allows you to re-install Windows without losing any of it. Also, by installing all of your programs in a separate space, you keep the size of your backups manageable, as all you really have to back up is the Windows directory. If you can restore from your backup, you won't have to re-install anything - it will all still be where it was before the crash.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
