Guide to a Painless Internet Experience

What's this site all about then?

This site is designed to help everyone who has problems with spyware, virii (plural of virus) and a generally horrible and slow internet experience. If your homepage changes often, you get pornographic pop-ups or you've noticed that your internet browsing has become really sluggish then this probably means you! It is also designed to help make users aware of internet risks, suggest ways to make themselves more secure and hopefully prevent problems like these occurring to you. It was originally conceived to help those at my university who seem to be overrun with them, but no doubt some in the wider internet will also find it useful.

Requests

The first three tabs are now a good deal more comprehensive and (on the whole) this is the colour scheme and design I shall probably continue with. My coverage of Firefox is limited - if you know a good site outlining its best features, or something as comprehensive as the Opera Wiki for Firefox then please do let me know. Tabs further to the right will be expanded as my time allows.

How to use this site.

Clicking the tabs will open a new page and also (often) reveal a short submenu underneath (screenshot). You can use these to quickly jump to the point of interest in the page, without having to scroll down. Every page will eventually have several summary sections like this which will condense the following section into a few bullet points. These are designed so you can easily find what you want and to help you avoid having to read through mountains of text to get some advice.

Which sections should I look at?

The purpose of this site is to prevent rather than cure and to that end you should see the first tab is 'Good Practice'. This is divided into three sections, general internet browsing, email usage, and (following recent worms) MSN usage. If you follow these simple rules then the risks of you having problems greatly diminish. There is no substitute for a user who is alert to potential problems and two or three minutes spent reading now could save you hours of problems later.

Each page will generally follow this structure where appropriate:

Hopefully this site will prove of some benefit to internet users. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions then please do email. You can reach me at uplift_1 @ fastmail.fm , but don't forget to remove the spaces. You can find the changelog here. Ciao