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How do I stop a Virus infecting my PC?

Now that you’re aware that you need to run a virus before it can infect your computer, there are steps you can take to recognise a virus before you run it!

• Use a web browser that protects you! Firefox is one of the most secure and well featured web browsers. It will automatically warn you if it detects a common attack, or you browse to a known dubious website. Internet Explorer also has a number of safety features, however make sure you have enabled the Phishing Filter. With either browser, security holes are found and fixed over time, so you need to keep up to date with their automatic update systems.
• Read the web browser's warnings carefully. There are millions of websites that need plug-ins like Acrobat Reader or Flash to display content properly. When a website asks to install a plug-in, read the security notice and the signed manufacturer of the plug-in. If it’s someone recognisable like Microsoft, Intel, Adobe etc, it will be a valid plug-in. If you’re on a dubious website and the plug-in is by a company you’ve never heard of, or their security certificate has expired, you should do further research before installing it.
• Use an e-mail provider that takes care of the virus scanning and spam filtering for you. Gmail has some of the best spam filtering technologies available (as well as many other fantastic features) that will prevent malware from reaching your computer in the first place. If it does reach your computer, be wary of suspicious links. A financial institution asking you to browse to their website? Someone selling pharmaceuticals? It’s probably fake. Beware attachments, you can save them to your computer and scan them with your scanner before opening them.
• Always scan removable media or received files before you run the programs and/or open the documents.
• Use Virus Total to scan suspicious files that your virus scanner says are clean. No virus scanner is perfect, and Virus Total will check the file against a dozen scanners to see if there are any virus hits. Don’t forget some scanners may have fake positives and while one or two scanners says it has a virus, you may know better.
• Learn your file extensions. Make sure you turn on visibility of file extensions in Windows, and learn the difference between programs and documents. A document is a repository of information required by a program. It might contain program settings, image data, audio or layout data. A program is a set of instructions that a processor must execute to perform a function. All viruses are programs (a set of malicious instructions for the computer to follow), so 99% of virus infections are caused by running infected programs.
  
  The most common infected file extensions include (but are not limited to):
  BAT; CMD; COM; DLL; EXE; OCX; PIF; SCR; SYS; VBE; VBS; VBX;
  You should always scan these types before running them.
• Ignore ‘Virus Warning’ scare e-mails. Almost all of these are hoaxes, and while we have never seen one carrying a virus, they also seldom carry any useful information.