Did I hear you say “FREE” Antivirus

Yes! you heard me right.  What many of us don’t know, is that there are free versions of Antivirus products that will do just as good of a job of some of the well known bigger players such as McAfee and Norton.  In most instances, when a new laptop or desktop is purchased from either Dell, HP or IBM they usually come pre-installed with a 30 day version of either McAfee or Norton, and nine times out of ten a standard user will re-new that membership when the trial ends usually costing them $$.  Now I’m not a McAfee or Norton basher but these high end products do come with their own share of issues such as increased complexity, too many features to handle and configure for an average user and did I mention the high memory usage!!  Most people realise that their machines run a whole lot better without these “thick heavy weight” antivirus product suites.

Now should we discard security in favour of performance?  Hmmmm I have run without any antivirus for months on end, but then again I am a seasoned pro when it comes to these things and hence recommend against running without.  However there are a couple of products that I would like to introduce to you that are slimmer, come without the unwanted bells and whistles of some of their bigger brothers and perform just as good in defending your machine against malware.  Did I forget to mention that they are also FREE!

These are namely Free AVG and Free AVAST both which I have used personally and have recommended to many of my friends.  Both of these products will require you to register in order to obtain a serial key usually providing you with 12 months worth of free signature updates.

Both of these products will have restrictions on usage such as “free of charge for non-commercial home use ONLY. If you are not a home user or if you use your computer for business purposes, please purchase the professional edition”.

Always keep in mind that regardless of whether you are running antivirus or choose to do without, always be extra cautious when opening emails with suspicious attachments or from those that are deemed not trust worthy.  Always take care when browsing the world wide web and stay away from malicious sites such as bittorrent and other peer to peer sharing sites.  At the end of the day it all comes down to a bit of common sense.

Now straight from the horses mouth, Microsoft will be releasing a “free” antivirus solution in the near future.  It is called Microsoft Security Essentials and is currently in beta to US residents only.

If you have come across other free antivirus solutions out there, feel free to recommend them to the rest of us by placing a comment.

I’ll finish off by saying that I usually relate to Antivirus as Car Insurance.  It’s one of those products that you need for peace of mind but never want to use or claim during an accident, and believe me when I say I have seen many times, machines that are infected when antivirus has been installed.