A great website with many many tools and information for keeping your computer Clean and un-infected with germs is
www.computercops.biz its also a forum.. so if you need help you can post a question and you will have responses in mins.
Just as a side note... A lot of people tend not to pay much attention when installing software and tend to let the installer choose whatever it wants to do. Its important to pay attention becuase a lot of the times they want to start their program on startup so that when you go to use the program its already running and will open right up. where as if it wasn't already running you might have to wait an extra 30-40 seconds so it can load when you want it to load.
I personaly use a Anti-Virus by a company called AVG anti virus... (it is rated as one of the top 3 anti virus programs and I beleive uses the least amount of system resources!!!! you can get it from here if you are intrested
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php
another program thats great to have on hand is called Adaware by (lavasoft) its free and works wonders... I run it once or twice a week (I do a lot of surfing) and it works great. Makes sure no one is putting tracking cookies on my computers.
lastly...and I only recomend this one if you are somewhat techie and know windows very well... Hijackthis. Is a great program that takes a picture of your registry and lets you remove unwanted things from your registry...
last recomendation ... DON'T USE MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER!!!! Download Firefox... Its MUCH MUCH faster... allows you to tab windows which allows you to only run one instance of the aplication but have severy tabs where you maybe doing searches on different pages (however you can also run multiple instances) which also frees up your task bar. The biggest reason for not using IE explorer is that everyone and their sister knows IE explorers exploits! Another thing thats nice is that Firefox is open source softwear so there are a lot of people developing for this which means it has more opertunity to become bigger and better .. (Although Keep your eyes opened... Rumer has it that Google will be releasing their browser and from what I understand its going to built using Firefox as its platform they (google) actually just hired the cheif programer from firefox)
And just for a handy note... if you haven't seen it yet head on over to google and try out their beta version of Google maps its a great thing ... GOOD BYE MAP QUEST!!!
http://maps.google.com
