How Effective Is Free Antivirus Software?
I was talking to one of my buddies yesterday and we were discussing various things. He used to work as an IT guy providing technical support for a major computer company. As we were chatting he mentioned that one of the questions he frequently had to answer was whether or not free antivirus software actually protected you as well as paid software.
I thought that this was a great topic to post about considering I myself use a free antivirus program. The program that I use is called Avast Antivirus and I have been using it for about 2.5 years now. During that time I have been to quite a few sites and every single time that something tried to invade my computer or a file tried to execute a virus Avast was there to catch it.
In fact before I had started using Avast I was using Norton Antivirus, a pretty popular piece of antivirus software. Honestly, Norton wasn’t able to catch a few of the viruses and while none of the ones that it let slip by caused much harm the whole point of the software is to protect my computer.
Yeah but you are missing out on all of the great features that you get when you pay for a product! Actually…no I’m not! I was hesitant at first but after using Avast for even a short amount of time I found it to provide plenty of features while not bloating my system. Avast antivirus provides real-time live scanning of all files and even your connection to the net. So instead of you downloading a file with a virus and catching if after the fact, Avast catches it beforehand.
Now I’ve only ever used Avast because really it’s provided me with everything that I have needed. With that said, I haven’t tried out any other free antivirus programs yet but I do know that they are out there. Of course there are also the pieces of software that cost money as well. Not that it is wrong that they cost money, Norton provides a great piece of software though it does come with extra features that you don’t necessarily need.
I was recently browsing the net and found a great page talking about how to check if you have a virus and they provided some really great tips. In the end, from my experiences, free antivirus software is definitely worth it. I think that you just have to find the right company that is providing quality software and Avast provides just that.
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