Best Antivirus Software

Everyone is beginning to understand the importance of having an antivirus program or spyware installed onto their computers. Our computers at home or at work hold countless irreplaceable files that would be devastated if corrupted or deleted due to a virus. As you search on the Internet you will be able to find a wide variety of antivirus software programs. Since everyone is more interested in the antivirus protections it seems that all the companies are jumping on the boat and trying to sell their own antivirus software. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Let’s talk about some of the best antivirus software that is out there.

Feel free to do your own search on the Internet where many people have created product review websites that will allow you simple comparison between the best antivirus programs. This article will just touch on a couple of them.

One of the most highly ranked antivirus software is Avast. They have a good reputation that has been going on for many years. It has some of the best features compared to all of the other antivirus software on the Internet. For free or the price you pay you get the most for your product. It has great defense from viruses and other hacker malware on the Internet. It’s also considered to be very user-friendly software along with its many great features.

Another great antivirus software is Avira. They have many similar features to Avast but the main difference is the cost. They are a little pricier than some of the other products but still have a great reputation and support staff to back up the price.

AVG antivirus is another program that is becoming ever more popular among antivirus users. It can’t quite compare with the two above-mentioned software but it does offer a great price for the product. It will still give you great protection but not the extent of features for free or low cost. Avast antivirus will continue to improve over time.

One of the most common antivirus software programs is Norton Antivirus. This software comes preinstalled on many computers and many people choose to keep it. It is considered one of the best antivirus programs but it does lack in some of the major features of the other programs.

Most of these companies have free or free trial offers for their software. Take the time to see which antivirus software is best for you and protecting your files. Each product will have different pros and cons so in the end it’s up to you to choose the best antivirus software for you.

The Best Free Antivirus Software website has some additional information that you might find useful.

Best Free Antivirus Software

The best free antivirus software is better than most of the commercial software available.  Some commercial antivirus software have big system performance hits that slow down your computer.  They do background scans, email scan, web scans, and other scans that are mostly unnecessary and hurt computer performance.  However some of the free software is better optimized to allow your computer to perform better. The best free antivirus protection is still AVG antivirus software.  There are some other very good programs, but AVG basic free is optimized for fast performance and with automatic daily updates it is one of the most highly rated software programs ever.  There is also a 30 trial Pro version, but the basic free is all you need for good protection.  I only use antivirus software to alert me of a problem.  Once compromised or infected I restore my operating system using an imaging program.  More important data is kept on a second partition or stored externally.  So when the need arises I can quickly restore the operating system and be back to a known good configuration within a few minutes.

There are several good products, some are free,  available for restoring a computer.  A good free Open Source product is called Partimage which is a clone of Norton Ghost.  Partimage is a Linux utility and can be found on most Linux Live CDs.  I have created several Linux Live CDs with some of my favorite system restore utilities.  I also like Norton Ghost DOS version which can be added to a DOS bootable CD.  DOS is still my favorite utility because it is so fast and easy to use.  I use it to keep my lab running 24/7/365 with 99.9% availability in a high school classroom where the students have admin rights for doing their labs on all the computers.  Some students do abuse the privilege, but it only takes me less than 15 minutes to restore all 35 computers to a fresh configuration.

When my students ask me why I bother with DOS, I tell them, ” Windows is the problem but DOS is the solution”.  I still teach troubling shooting but I also remind the students the time you take to trouble shoot software that is millions of lines of code and full of problems could be better spent researching and studying for your next certification.