Whoa... I can't believe that little spiel I wrote up way back when is still up.
To field a few questions and make a few comments:
Avast! is a nice personal antivirus that has come into its own since I wrote the above. A few false alarms may show up on occasion, but it's also picked up a few things that Norton and McAfee glossed over. Overall, it's a very nice little utility and you can't beat the price of $0.
Tiny Personal Firewall is (IMO) better than ZoneAlarm because it is A. less bloated B. more stable and C. offers finer-grained control. Although, the reverse can be said due to ZA's IDS feature (where it bans access from IPs that attempt known cracks) but this isn't a big deal for home users. Then again, in a corporate environment, I'd favor a well-configured *nix firewall over ZoneAlarm Pro, at least at entry points. This aside, I have found that TPF is more stable in some configurations, such as finnicky SMP hardware, but most people here aren't likely to even see such a computer anytime soon.
Now, it seems there are a few new players in the free personal firewall market. I haven't tested these, but they look interesting:
www.kerio.com/kpf_download.html www.bart-ware.net/fw2/
Bart-ware Personal Firewall includes some spam filtering in the free version (though you're better off using the Bayesian filtering built into Thunderbird) while Kerio's personal firewall is more fully-featured, comparing to ZoneAlarm. This is as far as I am able to comment, as I have not tested either application.
If you want to learn about computers or hacking, STAY THE HELL AWAY from viruses and cracking utilities. True hackers work by learning all they can about what they use and what can be done with it. People that muck about with others' computers are crackers; hackers are instead experts who, for better or for worse, have an intimate knowledge of the most poorly-understood technology yet created by man. In fact, if you act by using tools you don't understand, you effectively get to wear the Script Kiddie label. As one would guess, the title garners only disrespect and derision.
The right way to do it is to read all you can, and them start messing around with things on your own equipment. Good sites to read are slashdot.org, arstechnica.com, tomshardware.com, hardocp.com, and... hell, search Google for tech news and reviews sites. They are often packed with good information, and link to other sites.
The benefit of a dedicated appliance (hardware) firewall is that it is not subject to the maladies of a personal computer. Personal software firewalls can crash, can be compromised, can be worked around via severe security holes in an operating system (albeit rarely,) can be deleted or otherwise imparied by a virus or trojan, etc. It's running on something that isn't entirely reliable in an attempt to make it less unreliable, and as such it is inherently less reliable than a specialized, stand-alone computer built for the task.
You can get a virus by simply accessing a web page when your web browser has a security vulnerability. Bugs in a browser's rendering engine can allow someone to take control of it by using the right Dirty Little Tricks, which are usually very specific to a single browser and even specific versions of said browser. Running the newest version of your browser of choise helps. Not running Internet Explorer helps even more, as it has more known flaws than every other modern browser combined (and likely will for the forseeable future.) I highly recommend Mozilla Firefox, available at
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox as a fast, reliable browser that actually gets updates and bug fixes on a regular basis.
Email clients work the same way. Always use the most up-to-date version possible, and stay the hell away from Outlook and Outlook Express. Mozilla Thunderbird, at
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird is a decent alternative.
Now, the reason that Blizzard makes life so difficult for third-party applications is simple: to keep everyone's gameplay as balanced and fair as possible. That's the concept behind it, anyway. Bitch all you want about how Maphack should be allowed, I'm not going to argue about it. I'd personally still have D2JSP but I'm not paying for the priviledge of screwing with an outdated game I've played the hell out of already. That BS aside, they actually can sniff out Maphack and other programs but only when something happens that raises a red flag, so to speak. Is it possible to make using Maphack impossible? Yes and no. Certain measures can be taken to keep a particular executable from running, but they are almost all either easily worked around, or impractical. The few methods that could theoretically work, would also render the game unplayable due to a performance hit. So, in short, you can get away with using certain third-party hacks, as long as you don't do anything obvious.
It should be noted that Blizzard is more than capable of going after 3rd-party programs that interfere with their software. It's very difficult to, say, go after Maphack because they haven't really done anything blatantly illegal. However, a google search for bnetd will reveal examples of a 3rd-party app they DID send lawyers after. If they feel something is a threat to their business and that they have a good chance of going after it, they are more than well-enough equipped to do so.
It should also be noted that as far as making people want to play the game more goes, Blizzard only benefits when someone buys a new copy of DII. The miniscule amount of revenue they might get off of banner ads in the chat portion of the game doesn't come anywhere near the costs of maintaining a service that is free to use for those who have paid a one-time fee. In a sense, the more you play a copy of DII after it's purchased, the less money Blizzard has made off of said copy. It is, in all seriousness, about maintaining the integrity of the gameplay and the integrity of their network. I'm sure we can all remember the occasions when rampant use of widespread Pindlebots combined with a widespread unpatched dupe hack caused new game creation waiting lists to reach five figures... they want to avoid that crap, and with good reason. It pisses everyone off, and it sucks down their (not free) bandwidth.
I'd like to add a few more recommendations as well:
1. Download and install Spybot. Does a great job of finding and stopping all kinds of crap that antivirus programs don't bother with. It's well worth it, if only for the option to monitor for attempts to make crap run at Windows start-up.
2. Windows Update is your friend.
3. Never connect Windows to the internet unless it's behind some kind of firewall, not today. Way too many worms, especially for 2000 and XP.
4. Research how you can get rid of unneeded services running on Windows 2000 and XP. There's a few (at least) on every new installation that you can afford to turn off.
5. Learn to type, god ****ing damnit. u is a letter, you is a word. Excessive capital letters hurt the eyes. And please, for the love of all that is good and just, don't accuse anyone whose opinion differs from yours of being a noob. It's a good way to get your ass made a fool of.
Mods, please feel free to edit the original post to your liking in order to include any relevant information from here or elsewhere. In retrospect I think I did a halfway-decent job on my little guide considering it was something I threw together in half an hour for shits and grins, but it's a wee bit dated now and I don't think of it as being complete in any sense of the word.