The days of free antivirus software are gone...

Free Antivirus Software? Just like firewalls, there are few free antivirus programs out there that I would trust my hard drive to.  You have to ask yourself, what company can I trust all of my data with. 

 

Once you connect your computers together on a home network it becomes very important to keep them all safe with both a firewall and antivirus software. If a virus makes it on to one of your computers, it can spread across your file shares corrupting data and damaging software all over your network. The latest virus’ and worms are ‘home network’ aware and can exploit many kinds of home networking setups.  Just a couple of weeks ago, a relative of mine had data destroyed on three machines due to a single machine catching a virus.  

A few months ago, virus’ were mostly spread by email – these days they are a little trickier. The last round of worms actually attached themselves to web pages on the Internet, exploited a hold in your web browser and infected computers that were simply browsing the web. I suggest loading antivirus software on every computer that uses the Internet in any way (at a minimum!).

Simply put, yes. There is no antivirus program out that that will run completely transparently. On slower machines, the performance difference may be quite noticeable. In the end it comes down to this: would you rather loose all the data on your entire computer network or have your systems run a little slower. I have had too many people around me loose too much data NOT to load one.

Many antivirus packages are now subscription based instead straight licensing. This is because it takes a great deal of effort to keep antivirus databases up to date. After loading antivirus software, you must allow program to update itself frequently. Virus’s spread fast and an out of date virus database is as ineffectual as not having antivirus software loaded in the first place!

http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_index.htm

Kaspersky Lab develops a wide range of anti-virus products for individual users to protect both stand-alone and networked home computers. Kaspersky™ Anti-Virus (AVP) has advanced capabilities for defense against all types of computer viruses, including script, macro and polymorphic viruses, Trojans, Internet worms, dangerous Java applets and ActiveX code. The software guards all virus entry points so you can fully concentrate on your work and safely use your computer.

I would suggest purchasing the Personal version for $49.99. It has a great email filter that has caught over 1000 email virus’ that have been thrown at me over the past few months. Not a single one has gotten through! For computers not running email, you can probably get away with the $19.95 personal version.

Kapersky AVP is available for both Windows and Linux!

McAfee has been in the antivirus business for a LONG time. The always offer fantastic ‘pacakge’ prices when you purchase 2 years work of updates at a time. They are less expensive than Kapersky Labs AVP but in my opinion not as fast. Along with all the standard antivirus features like email checking, McAfee includes PDA synchronization protection and a personal firewall. Talk about full featured!

Along with the PC version, Symatec offers a strong Macintosh version. Both Windows and Mac versions are about $50. Although a strong offering, I felt that the system slowdown was much like McAfee.

http://www.symantec.com

RAV is a highly efficient antivirus integrated suite for Windows, Linux and OpenBSD. They have workstation and server level editions of their product. RAV for Windows comes bundled with protection for the operating system, Office 2000, Outlook, and web browsers. RAV Antivirus is the least expensive of the antivirus programs listed here coming in at only $29 for the home edition.

http://www.ravantivirus.com