You'll see that my themes are (1) doesn't use many resources, (2) works well without being a pain to use, and (3) free or cheap. For me, simpler is usually better.
SPAM:I don't use any particular product for Anti-Spam, just
Thunderbird's built-in filter which works beautifully after you train it for a little while. I rarely (if ever) see spam in my inbox, and since I'm on a broadband net connection I don't care at all about deleting the spam before or after it downloads.
Anti-Virus:I use Symantec Anti-Virus 9.0 Corporate. It works and it's what I have. I would be interested in recomendations for any good,
non-resource-intensive, cheap anti-virus applications. I don't mind paying, but I don't want to have to subscribe to anything. It should update it's definitions without complaining or reminding me in any way forever (additional functionality of course doesn't need to be free). I've heard that Symantec ruined the Corporate AV product with v10, so I won't be updating mine.
Online Ads and Popups:Firefox and
AdBlock Plus (plus the
Filterset G Updater which is an addon that auto-updates Adblock's definitions). That's all you need. I never see ads. Period. Plus it's free and works beautifully. The nice thing about AdBlock Plus is that it's easy to whitelist specific sites so that if it happens to mess a page up (which is pretty rare) then you can quickly and easily whitelist that page to keep it working. Another nice add-on for Firefox I use is
Flashblock. This simple plugin just deactivates any Flash content on web sites (before you download the content) and replaces them with a button that you can click on to activate that particular flash object at will. This is great for those obnoxious flash-heavy sites that make you jump through a bunch of "promo" things before you get to the real content.
Spyware:The old standards...
Lavasoft AdAware followed by a reboot and then
Spybot S&D. They work, they're free, and they find and kill just about everything out there. I've tried lots of other Anti-Spyware products (including pay products) and nothing really works as well. The only one that got close was
Webroot's SpySweeper. It was nice in that it worked automatically similar to an Anti-Virus application, but it wasn't nice enough for me to pay for it. AdAware also has a paid version that offers many of these features if you want them. Personally, I'd rather not have it running all the time eating up resources. I scan my machines once every other month or so and combined with running Firefox for all my browsing I never have spyware problems. In my testing Microsoft's Anti-Spyware app worked pretty well at the common spyware applications out there, but there were quite a few real threats that it missed. It also failed to properly remove some of the more insidious applications out there (coolwebsearch for one), even though it did detect them and report that it had removed them.
General Maintenance:Someone above made the recommendation to create an Image of your computer when it is properly running. I can't encourage this practice enough. I keep all of my user-files (basically the contents of all of my user's "My Documents" folders) on a separate hard drive. When I perform a fresh-install of Windows on the machine I always create 2 backup images of the main system drive (I use Norton Ghost but only because that's what I learned to use at work). The first one is just a very basic image of the machine with Windows installed and any drivers required to run the machine (chipset, video card, networking, and storage) and nothing else. I then create a second image of the machine with a full suite of all the applications I generally install (soundcard drivers, Firefox and Thunderbird, Office, MC, Adobe CS2, etc, etc, etc). I keep these images in a closet on a hard drive I bought for the purpose which can be re-inserted whenever I need to. That way if I have trouble, I can always step back to one of those two "base installs" to fix or diagnose the problem. Since all the user data is on a separate disk I don't have to worry about losing that stuff when I re-image.