Free Antivirus Software? Just like firewalls, there are few free antivirus programs out there that I would trust my hard drive to.  You have to ask yourself, what company can I trust all of my data with. 

 

Once you connect your computers together on a network it becomes very important to keep them all safe with both a firewall and antivirus software. If a virus makes it on to one of your computers, it can spread across your file shares corrupting data and damaging software all over your network. The latest virus’ and worms are ‘ network’ aware and can exploit many kinds of networking setups.  Just a couple of weeks ago, a relative of mine had data destroyed on three machines due to a single machine catching a virus.  

A few months ago, virus’ were mostly spread by email – these days they are a little trickier. The last round of worms actually attached themselves to web pages on the Internet, exploited a hold in your web browser and infected computers that were simply browsing the web. I suggest loading antivirus software on every computer that uses the Internet in any way (at a minimum!).

Simply put, yes. There is no antivirus program out that that will run completely transparently. On slower machines, the performance difference may be quite noticeable. In the end it comes down to this: would you rather loose all the data on your entire computer network or have your systems run a little slower. I have had too many people around me loose too much data NOT to load one.

Many antivirus packages are now subscription based instead straight licensing. This is because it takes a great deal of effort to keep antivirus databases up to date. After loading antivirus software, you must allow program to update itself frequently. Virus’s spread fast and an out of date virus database is as ineffectual as not having antivirus software loaded in the first place!

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