Choosing the Best Virus Protection

Choosing the best virus protection for your computer is very important, especially with the recent increase in the amount of viruses and trojans that are appearing online. It seems that a new virus is detected ever week, and infection with one could result in loss of data, or your computer becoming part of a spam botnet without your knowledge.

When chosing your virus protection software, there are a couple of things that you will need to consider, such as:

Coverage - Does the program protect agains all types of viruses? A lot of the modern antivirus programs do not only cover viruses, but also protect against malware, and some even include other forms of computer security. An important aspect of this is the frequency of updates, since new viruses keep getting discovered, and if the virus descriptions in the software are not updated regularily, the software will not be able to protect agains the newest viruses. Luckily, just about any antivrus software has automatic updates to make sure that it can handle the latest threats.

Ease of use - Most modern antivirus programs are very simple to use and install, and most of the time, you should be able to use the default settings for your program. Related to this is the extent of support that the company offers. I recommend that you ask around, and check out the company forums (if they have any).

If you want to see how easy a piece of software is to use, most software offers an antivirus free trial period of about a month.

If you do decide to test several antivirus solutions, in order to find the best antivirus program for yourself, do not have them running together at the same time, since they will interfere with each other. Rather, test one, uninstall it, then install the next one.

Effect on performance - This is something that you should really test, as you can read above. Since antivirus software needs to keep checking for viruses, it will have an effect on how the other programs on your computer behave. Most of the time, this effect is too smll to notice, but if you have unusual software running, you will want to see that the antivirus does not have an impact on its speed.

A lot of the modern antivirus software included "Gamer Mode" which has less impact on performance, but offers less protection. It is primarily intended for running games, since they can put a strain on the computer, but you can also use it for anything that seems to make the computer run slow, such as image editing software, or 3D software. Just remember to come out of gamer mode once you no longer need it, in order to stay protected.

The other thing to look out for is the anti-virus software that raises alerts for every single thing you do, such as openning a new link, or installing a program yourself. This could get quickly annoying if there are too many warnings. While you do want the nest virus protection that you can get, the extra warnings tend to be counterproductive, as real threats might get ignored.

Additional features - Some software comes with additional features, such as spam protection, keylogger scanning and firewalls. You will need to decide what you need from those.

One option to watch out for is when anti-virus software comes with a bundled firewall, since this will interfere with the firewall that most versions of windows have by default. If you do decide to use antivirus software with a firewall of its own, you must make sure to switch off the windows firewall, otherwise you might run into difficulties.

Price - A lot of people consider this the most important factor, and I have included it here for the sake of completeness. Most antivirus software is in the region of $20-40, and the really important thing is finding something that will keep you safe, without interfering with your use of your computer.

Well, I really hope that this article will help you chose the best virus protection for your needs. In my experience, most of the antivirus software currently on the market will keep your computer protected, so the best thing is to test out a couple of them, and keep the one that you like the best.

I personally use avast anti-virus, since it meets all my requirements. I feel that it gives me the best virus protection, but you should really make up your own mind. Another antivirus software solution worth looking at is AVG.