what safety precautions should I have?

[boondockSAINT]

What sort of safety precautions should I have on my laptop? I have a wireless connection, and use Avast! antivirus w/ firewall. I stumbled into this section of the forum by accident, and now I'm paranoid!

I tried putting my IP address into here, but it didn't find it:
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation

On a side note, my old computer that I had about 2 years ago didn't have any antivirus software on it, and I would occasionally get a message saying "this is your IP address, your CD-rom drive is opening" and sure enough my cd-rom drive would open. How the hell does that work? I was downloading music at the time.

Now I have a new computer, and 2 laptops in the house run wireless off of it.

[zimmy]

the random progies knowing your IP is not a big deal...it just means that you are allowing icmp replies to go out. The cdrom opening means you have a very lax setting in your IE contols.

In terms of wireless security...just make sure that you require a key to use your access and if encryption is allowed on your model then use it.

[Adrnalnrsh]

Agreed, check and see if you wireless router has WPA PSK and use that.

Regards,
Adrnalnrsh

[kynetguy]

Agreed, check and see if you wireless router has WPA PSK and use that.

Regards,
Adrnalnrsh

Yea, WPA. That will stall me at least 30 minutes.

[outofthebox]

On a side note, my old computer that I had about 2 years ago didn't have any antivirus software on it, and I would occasionally get a message saying "this is your IP address, your CD-rom drive is opening" and sure enough my cd-rom drive would open. How the hell does that work? I was downloading music at the time.

that sounds a bit like netbus or another program of that nature...back in the day the netbus server was installed as a trojan of some sort and anyone scanning for that could basicly remote control your computer, they could watch what you are doing and pop up messages or in your case open and close the cdrom tray