PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

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Hack 97 Protect Your PC from Viruses

Stop incoming and outgoing viruses before they begin to tear apart your new system.

It happens to all of us. You will get at least one virus infection on your PC whether you like it or not. Whether or not that virus does any damage is mostly up to you and a little bit of software. A significant new virus is distributed every week or so, and yet there are thousands if not millions of PCs that have outdated virus protection, or none at all.

Ultimately it matters little which virus protection product you choose; you simply need to be protected. Ideally you want to use a virus protection product that does little, if anything, to get in your way and slow down your work and covers your email, web browsing, and the files on your hard drives as well as other writable media.

Almost every maker of virus protection software offers a free trial version for download, and most new PCs and motherboards come with a full or partial version of one product or the other. Be aware that a big brand name does not necessarily mean the fastest, most, or best protection. You can download and try each product to see which you like best, removing the previously installed product(s) through Add/Remove Programs and even using System Restore points to go back to preinstalled conditions. Check the license and subscription terms as well as the cost to determine if you'll be stuck buying the same product at nearly full price year after year.

If you need good virus protection quickly, I highly suggest AVG from Grisoft (http://www.grisoft.com). They offer Version 6 of their product line free. I've sold more friends on AVG than any other PC product around because many other products hog memory, disk space, and CPU time. AVG "gives them their PC back." After switching to AVG and turning off the other products, users typically experience Windows running as if they'd just increased their CPU speed, doubled their RAM, and installed a faster hard drive. You may also want to check out AntiVir Personal Edition (http://www.free-av.com/).

10.4.1 Paying for Virus Protection

As you might expect, one reason to pay for AVG is that you get support, not that you need much, if any, but Grisoft is very responsive, and heck, the product is so good that you'll feel you really ought to pay for it.

I also use "the other" products both personally and commercially in enterprise settings and find them to be adequate to the task of protecting your system. Don't feel you need to shy away from off-the-shelf commercialware, because you do have some good choices of where to spend your money with these top three virus protection products:

• PC-cillin from Trend Micro (http://www.trendmicro.com)

• Norton AntiVirus from Symantec (http://www.symantec.com)

• VirusScan from McAfee (http://www.mcafee.com)

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