Just be careful if you need to download stuff. Always double check everything, you never know what is hidden inside the download files.
Unfortunately, most people aren't technical and simply don't know what to look for. People need to start developing a sense for scammers and fly-by-night projects. It's usually best to let some other people be the guinea pigs too, when it comes to downloading potential malware (altcoin wallets). If a project sticks around the forums for a little while and has anyone relatively reputable associated with it, then I'm willing to look into it further. With the price rise being what it is, I know there is no shortage of hackers out to steal coins.
I think it is the best advice if your are not technical.
But being or becoming a bit more technical may help if you are in crypto. So using vm as suggested by supertee, that is not very complex to do, is the best way to go.
Technically, VMs are not fully secure. There are ways to use virtualization (e.g. via COM ports and other avenues) to enable malware from a VM to infect the host machine. It's probably unlikely in these cases, though. Using a VM should remove you from the "low hanging fruit" category. At this point, I think most wallet stealing software is only looking in the usual directories on the installed machine (the VM).
