Antivirus

If you use a computer, especially windows base one, be sure to install an antivirus program. Many people including computer technicians will tell you that. Even more, now we are more on the internet, never know what might happen and what to expect.

It’s like a doctor asking you to take medicine even though you are not sick!!

But prevention is better than cure, as they always say. So we are stuck with this for life, the computer antivirus will be our medicine, that we must always take and use in order not to get infected.

What is a computer virus by the way?

As written on wiki

“A computer virus is a type of malware that, when executed, replicates by inserting copies of itself (possibly modified) into other computer programs, data files, or the boot sector of the hard drive; when this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected". Viruses often perform some type of harmful activity on infected hosts, such as stealing hard disk space or CPU time, accessing private information, corrupting data, displaying political or humorous messages on the user's screen, spamming their contacts, or logging their keystrokes. However, not all viruses carry a destructive payload or attempt to hide themselves—the defining characteristic of viruses is that they are self-replicating computer programs which install themselves without the user's consent. “

Then, there is the human part in us in that, when we have an antivirus program installed on our computer we can do what we like on the web. Go to any site we wish, open any file and download any programs to install.

It’s like us given some medicine, so we can go out and eat whatever food we like even though some of them might not be healthy for you. After consuming those delicious foods, we will then take the medicine to control it.

That is not call prevention!! It’s taking the poison, then the cure. Another point to remember is, if the medicine dosage is not strong enough why not double the dosage or triple??

You see in the early years, antivirus program was small in size and quite good to contain virus. But ever since, we had new windows operating system, from windows XP to windows 8 and the INTERNET, everything is bloated up a lot, as more people use computers online with more hours making virus targeting us even easier.

So now, antiviruses not only need to target virus, it has to prevent spyware and also built in a firewall to block things probing to gain access to our computer. They call it ALL IN ONE antivirus. Having all in one is good but it will also slow down the performance of the computer. Similar to us taking strong medicine dosage, tend to make us tired and slow down, our activity. You get my point!!

Now you will ask which antivirus is the best? For me, there is no best. Everything is changing so fast, I would only say get an antivirus that you are comfortable with either paid or free.

Paid ones got more features for prevention and tweaking, more support, when you run into a problem help will be a human voice on the other side of the phone or online helpdesk. Free one are not bad too, but will always have advertisement, basic function to scan, clean and quarantine and with minimum or no support from the antivirus developer.

From my personal opinion

Heavy dosage, paid ones

Norton Internet Security

Mcafee Internet Security

Kaspersky Internet Security

Avira Internet Security

AVG Internet Security

Avast Internet Security

Medium dosage, free ones

Avira antivirus

AVG antivirus

Avast antivirus

Rising antivirus

Microsoft Security Essentials

Comodo

Forticlient

ZoneAlarm

Then we have the cloud antivirus, free.

Cloud ones, we install the antivirus software to our computer but the work on detecting the virus is somewhere and everywhere to do the prevention which helps to take the some load off heavy scanning for virus.

Think of it this way. We are taught and “programmed” to think a mosquito sucks blood and is a virus carrier.

Let say, a few of us are in, different area of a big room. A mosquito flies by. Instantly one of us spotted the mosquito and sounds the alarm to inform the rest that a target is roaming around, beware.

Panda cloud antivirus free

Immunet free antivirus

Kingsoft antivirus free

Bitdefender cloud antivirus free

So there you have it for the moment, at least install one antivirus please. I have seen quite a number of computers without one and once they are on the internet, most probably they are the carrier to spread more viruses around.