For having a peace of mind and not to worry about the personal data leaks / thefts and other annoyances, a home user’s must use list of programs should contain Antivirus in the top most slot!
Why?
With the recent trend of malwares that affect the computers, it is clear that some protection is needed in the first place to prevent a day at some computer service / repair shop, else be ready to spend a day of your precious precious time in setting things right.
First few questions that pop while thought process kick in are:
- How much performance impact it will have on my computer ?
- How does it perform against new threats ?
- How are the detection rates and update frequency ?
- What are all the features does the software have ? (This is a debatable question as it depends on whether one choose a free or a paid software!)
- How easy it is to operate ? (Will my elders understand what it is saying? Does it annoy with too much of information ? Is it configurable to lock down with minimal annoyances / messages ?)
- Are there any false positives? (Again a debatable Q and purely depends on the user type!)
Having armed with such and more questions, the options for a free antivirus program are endless!
The top notch are:
- Avast
- AVG
- Avira
- Comodo Antivirus (or Comodo Internet Security Premium (It’s a suite of security products))
- Microsoft Security Essentials
- Bitdefender Antivirus
- Panda Antivirus (Cloud)
and sure there are more, but these should be sufficient. Out of all these, Avast and AVG have got reputed themselves to be the best of the breed. But Avira is not left behind and it scores high on performance compared to Avast or AVG.
It works fantastic on some of the older systems as good as on the newer systems.
Try it out and you will not be disappointed!!
