Fact: Take spare change out of your pocket every night and put it in a child's piggy bank. At end of a year you will have at least a hundred dollars to spend as you wish.

Now take this same principle and discover huge payoff in "spare change" time you've been wasting all these years.

How often do you sit in front of your computer and wait?

Everyone waits for computer to reboot, restart, unlock, "scandisk", "defrag", finish printing, download a file from Internet or generally accomplish tasks that have you sitting twiddling your thumbs for at least 60 to 90 seconds or more.

The shocking truth is that those one, two and three minute nuggets of time contain seeds for accomplishing all tasks you never seem to have enough minutes in day to finish.

Computers represent a double-edged sword. On one hand, they are supposed to save us time by efficiently helping us with big tasks such as balancing our checkbooks, running our businesses, and doing our taxes.

In reality, it seems time computers save you gets sucked right back up in time-consuming tasks such as installing software, scanning for viruses and waiting for computer to restart!

Think about spare change in piggy bank example. Now use that same principle to your advantage by developing an awareness of how you spend your "pocket change" time in front of computer every day.

A worm is like a virus—it also replicates itself. However, it can stand on its own and does not need another program to run. It usually infects your computer’s networking features, which includes its internet connection.

Spyware and adware go hand-in-hand. Spyware is a kind of program which gathers information, specifically browsing habits.

It tracks down what kind of sites you visit, and adware will generate ads that fit with your interest which spyware based on information it gathered in first place.

Malware is malicious software. It’s any program that is useless, or worse, destructive. A Trojan a program pretending to be good but once it’s deep in your system it proves to be quite opposite.

In spite of all their differences, they have one thing in common: they are out to give you headaches by rendering your computer unusable.

To protect your computer as much as possible from being infected, here are four dangerous activities that you should avoid, or at least minimize:

• Opening email attachments

Do not open any email attachments if they aren’t scanned by antivirus software. Worms can spread through email, so even a friend can unwittingly send you one by way of an attachment.

• Internet File-sharing

In file-sharing via internet, your computer is exposed and open to others it is communicating with. If other computers’ files can be transferred to yours, same thing can be said about a virus, if others are infected.

• Downloading free software of questionable origins.