Anti-Virus Software

 

Sadly computer viruses are with us for the foreseeable future. Over the years the virus writer have become more creative in the ways to infect a computer and then propagate the virus. A computer virus is quite well named in the parallel to viruses which we humans suffer from. A virus infects the host, uses the hosts resources to multiply and infect others around. In the process it frequently causes unpleasant symptoms, occasionally death, in the host. Likewise a computer virus uses your computer for it's own ends, often disrupts the proper behaviour of your computer and in some vicious cases will cause permanent damage to the files stored on your computer as well as using it to infect other computers either via the time online (i.e. on the 'net) or via shared disc, floppy, CDs cut on the computer or USB drives. Not nice eh?

If you'd like to read a fuller description of of what a computer virus, worms and trojan horse are then the Microsoft web site has a good set of descriptions. You can read them by clicking here.

The real question to answer is "so what do I do about it?". The answer is to ensure you have some anti-virus software on your computer and that you keep it updated. What do I mean by that? Anti-virus software operates by knowing what particular virus look like. If it recognises a virus it will attempt to remove it and stop it causing harm. If it doesn't recognise it then it can do nothing. New viruses appear at regular intervals, so the software you installed last month will not recognise a virus written last week. Obviously the anti-virus writers know this and so they make updates available to be downloaded from their web sites. When you purchase the program you normally get the rights to download updates for a year. After that you need to buy another year's updates and so on. In a sense the price you pay for the software is actually the cost of the update service.

How do you know which is the best anti-virus software? The first point to make is that unlike spyware, the anti-virus software world is a relatively clean place and the popular products on the market do work. I'm going to recommend two of them to you; one from Zonelabs and the other from Grisoft. I will mention two others though. The first is Norton Anti-virus, owned these days by Symantec. This is probably the best known product and is the market leader, but it has come in for criticism recently for slowing down peoples computers more than it needs to do and for being tricky to uninstall. I have used this software for some time and have found that when I came to update the licence the whole process didn't work properly and I had to follow various steps to fix the problem. My Dad also has a copy and he too experienced problems with it, this time with the regular updates (call "Live Update" for Norton). So I'm going off it a bit and have decided not to recommend it. The other one worth special mention is PC-cillin from Trend Micro. This is a good product and takes less system resource than Norton. A recent test I read was very positive.

So why am I not recommending PC-cillin? Because of what I am going to recommend. On the Firewalls page I recommended the Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite (see our own short review) because it contained most of the things you need, one of those was an Anti-Virus product (the one from Computer Associates, a well respected company). Therefore if you choose to use this product you already have the anti-virus protection.  The latest release, version 6.0 released in July 2005 also now includes Anti-spyware in same package for the same price.

The second product I will recommend is Grisoft's AVG. The good news here is that home users can benefit from a free version. That's right, free. So what's the catch? Well you have to be a home user and er, that's about it. They provide an update service, the software doesn't use too many resources. The only downside I can give you is that the automatic update service provided only runs every two weeks and the Windows Security Center will report that your virus definitions are out of date, so you keep feeling nagged at. The others I've mentioned will all update themselves automatically every time you dial-up. Quite a comforting feature. Set against this is the word free. It's up to you really.