A Good Security Setup For a Very Good Price - Like Free!

There are several very good commercial anti-virus packages out on the market right now, but current research concludes that none of them are able to catch everything that is out in the wild. Add to this the fact that you can have only one resident Anti-Virus product installed on your machine at any given time, and it becomes obvious that there will be a few holes in your security setup even with a commercial package. And those commercial packages cost as much as $90.00 to protect three to five computers for a year.

Now much of the value in the commercial packages is in addition to the anti-virus aspect. Many of them provide parental controls for the computer, as well as anti-phishing and anti-spyware. Some even perform computer diagnostics or track backups for you. This is good for folks who need and use these extra services. However, many folks do not use these extra services if they even know about them.

There are several good anti-virus programs that are 100% Free for home users. My two current favorites are AVG Free and Microsoft Security Essentials, but there are other good free ones besides these. For those who are not using or needing the extra services of a commercial package, the free ones are good at the anti-virus that they do. That's great, you say, but what about the holes mentioned before? Free packages will have them as well.

Certainly this is true, which is why you do want to run more than one security software program. The trick is that the second program (or third or fourth) cannot be another resident anti-virus. So taking the example of a machine that has AVG Free anti-virus on it, one could add the following things to make the machine even more secure:

1. ThreatFire. This program (get the free version) sits on the computer and acts as a gate-keeper between Windows and the Internet. If it sees some suspicious activity, it will throw up an alert box for the user to respond to. I have seem this program take out some major malwares when the resident scanner had failed to. If a machine is already infected, this one may still install.

2. MalwareBytes anti-malware. Again with the free version this is a very good stand alone scanner. You have to manually update the free version, but it is very good at getting many different kinds of malware including Adware, which several other programs do not find. Since the program is not resident, you have to initiate the scan, which you would do if you had any reason to believe that there was a virus on the machine.

3. Super Anti Spyware. This program does run in the background all the time, but it generally does not interfere with your virus scanner. It is very good at getting certain types of spyware that the other virus checkers might miss. You can run manual scans as well.

Now a machine needs to have a little bit of horsepower to run all of these programs on top of what you would already do with the machine, but assuming your machine is fairly recent, and has 1 GB or more of RAM, you could likely run all of these if you needed to. A machine so protected would be very difficult to infect. Just make sure the security gets on before the viruses have already taken control, or you may need a professional to clean the machine for you.

Happy Computing to All.