Child's IM lose, parent's nightmare

Daughter returns from summer camp eager to IM with her much missed new-found friends. She announces "I can't IM." This is not good news. There is, in fact, a great deal more that suddenly can't be done on the family PC, including Mom's professional work, reports parent and Washington Post reporter Kathleen Day. Kathleen proceeds to spend "$800 and roughly 48 man-hours over nearly three weeks" to fix the family computer.

What would have been the No. 1 preventive measure? Installing a firewall before switching from a modem to a high-speed Internet connection (they already had anti-virus software installed). Over half of home Net users in the US now have high-speed connections, PC World reports, so if your home's one of them, I hope you haven't learned this important preventive measure the way Kathleen's family did - the hard way. The need for a firewall can't be stressed enough. Kathleen's fun-to-read article mentions several products, including the free version of Zone Alarm that she picked (another free one is Agnitum's). Please see my newsletter this week for more tips and links that can keep ordeals like Kathleen's at bay.