Back online.

It looks like I've underestimated my sickness. The cold bothered me more than the usual one week period, my PC wasn't quite all right after a while and my car needed more repairs :) After installing the latest security updates from Microsoft my PC is fine again. It looks like I had some malware software on my machine that have been annihilated by the Microsoft Antispyware tool. Someone was trying to lower my Internet connection security settings below the safe limit. The Antispyware tool noticed it right away and asked me if I want to block it. Then, some ActiveX component was trying to autoinstall but couldn't since I've been warned again.

In the mean time I've read about how to increase PC security while online. The first thing I did was to create an non administrative user account and do all the online activity from there. If you are using a Windows XP machine all the accounts have administrative privileges by default. To create a non administrative account go to Control Panel , click on the User Accounts screen and make the new account as Limited. Then logon from there when going online. For more information visit the following page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/share/intro.mspx.

Other links of interest:
- online security tips: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/sectip/default.mspx.
- user experience about online security: http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2005/01/17/354317.aspx.
- home PC security: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/default.mspx.