Antivirus Software Tips

In this guide I’ll try to explain why you need a good antivirus software package. I’ll also talk about which brands are good and which brands to stay away from. The best antivirus software package is no good if it is not properly maintained and updated. I’ll also give you some guidelines on keeping your antivirus software running smooth.

When reading this guide please keep in mind that these are my opinions that were made from my experience with computers. Other people might have different opinions than I do.

If you’re going to connect your computer to the internet you need antivirus software. It would also be a very good idea to have antivirus software if you won’t be on the internet much too. Most people don’t realize that there are brilliant people out there writing viruses that will steal your identity, crash your computer, spy on you, steal financial information, and much more. You might ask “Why would they do this?” Money. They somehow get paid big bucks to do such a thing. Many of them also do it simply for bragging rights.

These viruses can be very dangerous. Let me give you a few examples of what I’ve seen with my experience with viruses. When I was new with computers I had a virus on my computer that would dial 800 numbers at crazy hours of the night to run up my phone bill. I’ve seen viruses where people actually could see what you see on your computer on their screen. They could move your mouse and type on your computer just like they were sitting in your chair. I’ve seen where they use file swapping software to get financial data from your computer. I’ve had to fix computers where a virus deleted every picture on the computer and set it to not save files any more. The worse was when I caught a virus myself that erased my entire hard drive!

Now that you get a little bit of an idea of what these viruses are capable of doing, lets get you some good protection.

What makes a great antivirus software package? First of all it has to be able to quickly and accurately catch most viruses that find their way on your computer and get rid of them. Some antivirus software packages are better at doing this than others. Fighting viruses is a very complicated task. A great antivirus software package also has to be easy to use and understand and handles the complicated things on its own. A great antivirus software package will not bother you all the time with useless alerts and messages. Antivirus software is what I call “heavy” software. It takes a lot of memory and computing power to run. There is no way around this at this time. I’ve noticed some antivirus software will use more computing power than others with no gain in performance. Great antivirus software will go easy on your computer’s processing power and memory and still protect it from viruses.

I try hard not to point out name brands on this site. But I have to on this topic. There is no way around it. I’ve worked with a few antivirus software packages. Some of them were OK, some were great, and others were a virus in themselves. Below are a few that I recommend.