Saturday, July 29

Antivirus Solutions to go

Good Antivirus products

It's been enough of Articles and Information on Spam…Now I am shifting focus to Antivirus solutions. I have seen many times that people and even companies are uncertain about which antivirus is best for securing their Personal computers or their Network. People have different opinions about it. There are several very good antivirus makers in the Market that make top of the breed products and keep your antivirus latest with constantly updated database of virus definitions and product patches. Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro are some of the reputed ones that we are familiar with. I have myself tried and tested various antivirus products and I sincerely feel the need of a good antivirus scanner. What generally people require for their home pc is a good fast scanning engine, ability to detect and clean viruses easily, besides it should be easy to operate and update. A good antivirus is found to have the following essential characteristics:

Good detection rate: An antivirus scanner should be able to detect all types of viruses not only in uncompressed form but also in compressed form. It is an essential criteria for a good antivirus scanner.

It shouldn't be a system resource hogger: A good antivirus software shouldn't eat up a lot of your system resources. This is especially important for barebone systems which do not have high processing powers and oodles of ram.

Scan featues: Ability to scan boot sectors, scanning before startups, Creating emergency diskettes, Auto protection, scanning within compressed files, heuristic scanning, scanning emails and scheduling of scans, taskbased scanning, scanning downloads, ability to recover virus-infected files, variety of scanning options like including and excluding specific file types and generation of scan reports, creation of scan logs.

Ease of use: It should be easier to use and fairly understandable and configurable even by novices and non-technical users.

Just installing an Antivirus product is not sufficient, you must configure it properly according to your requirements. A good antivirus cannot do its job properly if it is't configured properly. Staying up to date with latest virus definitions also must not be overlooked. The two Antivirus products that I have found very good to use for a personal computer or SOHO or a small company network are Bitdefender Antivirus and Kaspersky Antivirus. They scan very fast without hogging up the system resources and are easy to update even on a dialup connection. If you are a general home pc user and use the computer for normal day to day activities like surfing, checking emails etc…

Try Bitdefender Antivirus
It even includes spyware scanning and detection capabilities.

On the other hand, if you are a bit advanced user, Kaspersky antivirus 2006 is a recommended choice. It has a very fast scanning engine and comparatively better detection rate than many other comparative antivirus products.

Remember, you pc security is in your hand and it's your liability to keep your pc secure. For more information about some of the best antivirus products, you may visit www.pcsecurityworld.com/antivirus.php

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