I think you should reload it, what does your school's IT guy say to use?  I have used various version of NAV which is a component of NIS for many years without any problems.

The IT guy said to just rely on the firewalls my LAN card and router have. Would that be enough? I still think I'm goimg to reload it though.

No. it would not be enough.  Firewalls, and routers provide some protection but would not prevent accidential downloading of a virus.  I have absolutely no idea what protection he believes a LAN card would provide.  You can check several Dell forums to confirm my statements also many governmental agencies both here and abroad recommend that Antivirus softwre be used.  P.S. what school is it, maybe I should apply for a job, since as far as I am copncerned your IT Guy knows zilch

You have got to load an AV program either NIS or a free one.  Read through the Virus/Spyware forum to get other recommendations on safe computing.

I'm not a very big fan of norton, mcafee or zone alarm firewalls.  They just become a HUGE annoyance for me.  I'd prefer a hardware firewall, like a linksys router (though if it is wireless does you just about no good if you leave it unencrypted).  Along with that I think the Windows XP SP2 firewall is pretty decent.  (Control Panel -> Windows Firewall -> On)  I'd definitely load Avast as far as virus scanners go, if you are a home user it's probably the best available Spyware Removal click the link and go to "virus removal" and under there Step 5 you'll find avast home and pro.  Get home if you qualify as a non-commercial user.  It picks up a lot of spyware so it works well for not getting spyware.  I have probably 100 or more of my clients running it and most all of them love it.  Also, as far as security stuff goes, I'm not just talkin' out of my hind end!  I have published security findings on http://www.cert.org but with anything, no one knows everything!  Avast is DEFINITELY better than Norton Antivirus 2004.  Nice thing about avast is that not only do you get Virus Def updates you also get program updates.  An example would be if you had Norton 2004, they don't give you Norton 2005 for free.  Well Avast does.  When Avast 4.7 comes out, you'll get that for free (whether professional or home user).  :D  Great product amazing it is free for home users!

About Avast, where can I get it from? Like what website would be a good place to get it from? Another qusetion, what are the benefits of having my wireless network encrypted? I was thinking about doing that before, but my dad said not to go playing around with it, even though I know a little about it. Can it help stop worms especially, because I have had some problems with them in the past. Well, I actually have NIS 2004 on my laptop right now, and it is holding up pretty well so far. But i'll have to check out this Avast anyway.

You can find a link to it at http://www.virusspy.com , the benefits of having your wireless network encrypted?  Well, basically whenever it isn't encrypted, your neighbor can use your network, and any pedophile/hacker (in signal distance) etc. can use your network for whatever they want.  Which may include breaking into your computers!  WPA is the encryption method that is not so easily cracked.  Though you need to chose a wpa-psk key that is 63 characters of randomness. 

You can find a link to it at http://www.virusspy.com then "Spyware Removal" and the professional and home editions are under Step 5, the benefits of having your wireless network encrypted?  Well, basically whenever it isn't encrypted, your neighbor can use your network, and any pedophile/hacker (in signal distance) etc. can use your network for whatever they want.  Which may include breaking into your computers!  WPA is the encryption method that is not so easily cracked.  Though you need to chose a wpa-psk key that is 63 characters of randomness. 

well, in order to do such a thing one would have to know what kind of wireless router you have.  Some wireless routers aren't very WPA friendly.  You'd also most likely have to have Windows XP SP2 on your systems that are wireless (not A for sure) for WPA to function.  Though you can get WPA   WPA with only an 8 character key is weaker than WEP.  So I'd recommend going to

 

http://www.kurtm.net/wpa-pskgen/ and having it generate you a random 63 character key

 

It is possible that kurtm's randomness isn't very random, which in the security world can be dangerous, but since the only people that could actually even attempt to crack your key would be someone local, it isn't really a worry.  You could always change a few (maybe 10) of the characters if it would make you feel warm and fuzzy.  Also you could disable SSID broadcasting, though that isn't security, that is what we call obscurity.  It would keep your normal day to day neighbor from knowing you had a wireless network ALONG with having it encrypted. 

I don't have any written articles, just some advisories.  Nothing too interesting, you can find a million of them on www.cert.org (only one is due to myself).  I prefer to stay *slightly* anonymous around forums so I don't normally give that out because it has my last name and what not.  ;)  However, here is some info to get you goin'.  If you are more interested in the windows world of things, you'll wanna find info about SoftIce and Assembly language programming so you'll understand what you debug ;)  win32dasm is another one for disassembling stuff.  IDA pro is another disassembler.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow

http://www.securityfocus.com

http://www.ouah.org/prym.txt

http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/