Anti-virus tools.

There is no excuse not to have one.

So, you don't know anyone with an infected machine you say? Well, chances are you do, and you don't know it. around 10% of the PCs in the world are carrying an infection around with them. Some may display symptoms, some may not. All of them are dangerous to your mission. Most viruses today don't try to cause visible harm, but are in some way trying to get you to buy bogus things, steal your passwords and credit card information. To do this they are down right quiet about their activities, or worse, try to seem like they are being "helpful" to you. A good case in point is FakeXPA, one of the most evil nasties to come down the pike in a long time. You can read more about it at the Microsoft Malware Protection Center.

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Good protection can be had for free in your home environment.

Most good anti-virus software vendors have free versions for home and non-profit use. This is to foster trust in home users, who may have pull in deciding what anti-virus solution their business may buy. The vendors also know that alot of people compute on a shoestring budget, and after purchasing the computer, the operating system, a few games for the kids, and paying a monthly broadband bill, they can't be bothered to pay for protection. Why would this motivate them to give a good working product away? Because the more viruses they can "take off the streets" the easier their job gets.

Some free Anti-Virus solutions reviewed.

* * * * * Avira Anti-Vir. The solution I use, the solution that has worked the best. Not only is this product good at what it does, but it has caught several files even before they were known threats through it's heuristic detection engine. With a little tweaking, this product will do far more than most pay products will in a much cleaner, and neater package. To see this, switch it into expert mode. My only gripe is the ad box that pops up every time it updates. But then again, it does tell you that everything is functioning properly when it does, and that it is downloading updates. If your system was unprotected and Avira was damaged, you wouldn't see the ad. Think of it this way, when the kids are annoying you, everything is fine, when they go quiet, it's time to worry!

* * * * _ AVG Anti-Virus. Before I used Avira, I used AVG. It is an OK product, but it eventually became to "artsy" and not "meaty" enough, and I migrated to Avira. It just didn't seem to take virus protection seriously enough, and concentrated way too much on fancy interfaces. It also had alot of "come ons" (inactive, unactivatable menu items) designed to make people want to buy the full version.

* * * * _ avast! Home Edition. I tried this, just because I had heard good things about it. It seems like a very complete solution, and several people like it. I just happen to be one of those few who found fault with it. My findings are...

  1. It's too artsy, and noisy.

  2. It's a memory hog... no, memory hippo. If you have a half gigabyte to spare, go for it.

  3. It's a task hog, it's update process is a high priority task, and will stop whatever other normal priority tasks you are engaged in, or cause them to get choppy. Real great when you are playing an online battle game, NOT!

  4. Rumors fly that the product is good, because it was supposededly written by ex-pirates with exteme coding skills. I see no evidence of this, and my resources with some actual groups of reknown, agree, no connection they can find.

* * * _ _ Emsisoft a-squared. Comes recommended by a trusted source deep inside the anti-malware community. I have never actually tried out their software, but I think the software at least looks capable.

_ _ _ _ _ ClamWin Once a rising star in the field of GPL/Freeware software, a truely free and open Anti-Virus, has now disgraced itself by hopping in the sack with ask.com and distributing the ask.com toolbar with itself. Known to be, or have been spyware/adware, this is unacceptable behavior in the eyes of this site and cannot be tolerated. Further than that they have it so you have to uncheck to avoid getting the toolbar dropped on you, as in opt-out. Even if they change back, they have denied trust, and will never rise above 0 stars here. It would have been better to close source and start charging for a business version, like AVG or Anti-Vir.

_ _ _ _ _ Stopsign / Veloz / eAcceleration products. Once a molester, always a molester in my book. Everyone seems to have warmed up to this, at least to the point it's no longer called spyware/malware. But it's also given poor ratings by other places also. Personally, I wouldn't trust it near my machine. The company supposedly re-organized and cleaned up their act. Well, they should have changed names when they changed staff too. Don't know about you, but something smells rotten in denmark to me.