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AntiVirus Utilities
In today's world it is very important to protect your computer against unwanted programs. The three common ways these programs get on your machine are hacking, SpyWare, and viruses.
Hacking can occur if your machine is on the Internet and is not protected with a firewall of some sort, whether it be software or hardware. If you do not have a firewall I would suggest
Sunbelt's Personal Firewall.
It has won awards, is small and fast, and if you don't need support or lots of options you can run the basic version for free.
SpyWare is a type of program that gets onto your machine and causes it to do things that you don't want, like send
information about your web browsing habits to someone or cause your browser to go to places that you didn't tell it to.
SpyWare is one of the main causes of unexpected pop up advertisements. There are two free programs that work well together
called SpyBot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware SE Personal which can remove about 85% of the SpyWare out there. After you
install them make sure you use the update feature to get all the current definitions. You should check for updates every
month or so and scan your machine at least that often.
Get SpyBot from
www.safer-networking.org,
get Ad-Aware from
www.lavasoft.com.
If you would like to be a little more pro-active about SpyWare you can get an anti-SpyWare program that will run resident, protecting your system at all times. There aren't any free ones out there, but they aren't that expensive.
The one that I have been happiest with is called Counter Spy, by Sunbelt Software.
You can get a free trial or purchase the program by following the link below:
Finally there are viruses - it used to be that the only way to get infected was to open Email from someone you didn't know. Unfortunately this is no longer true - you can get infected by simply being on the Internet nowadays. The best protection against this is to install an antivirus program and make sure it is up to date. If you think you have one installed, but aren't sure if it is current, or aren't even sure if you have one, you can check here:
Counter Spy
If you do not have an antivirus program installed you can run a free scan of your machine from www.housecall.antivirus.com or from Panda ActiveScan.
If you know you have a virus, or the scanner finds one, but can't fix it, you may be able to find a tool to get rid of it here:
People ask me for recommendations all the time. Personally, I use Panda Antivirus software. Panda isn't all that well known around here, but they are a very well known company in the industry and provide very good support.
Below you will find links to demos of two of their packages - one includes SPAM filtering along with web content filtering (also known as parental control) and the other does not, but they both have the same antivirus protection.
Every time you get on the Internet Panda automatically checks for updates, which are released every day (most companies release updates weekly at best) which is one of the reasons I like it so much. --Larry
