Using a Free Anti-Virus Software for the Home PC

It is a must to have an anti virus product installed and running in your home PC, especially if you connect to the internet. I didn't have one installed since all I did on my PC was watch DVDs :) Once I got my internet connection I had to find a good product to install as the first order of business.

When it comes to anti virus software you cant find a single dominant product even though the number of popular products are small. One year its Nortan that seems to get all the good reviews and in a few months it's McAfee. So it's a good idea to search around the web for latest reviews and I came across few posts mentioning AVG Anti-Virus and most importantly the existence of a free version :)

Been a Sri Lankan with a Sri Lankan salary, free sounds very enticing. They provide three free programs for anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-rootkit. Basically the difference between AVG Pro (not the premium version which includes a firewall as well) and free versions are.

1. With the paid version you get technical support (I don't think I will ever need it)
2. Consent for commercial use (This is for my personal computer)
3. Faster downloads (update files)

All of the above are not issues and I can say the downloads are fast with the free version and they tend to be few hundreds of kilo bytes (unlike the few mega bytes of downloads of updates you get with Nortan).

I downloaded the free versions of Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Rootkit and installed all 3 of them. All of them seems to be fast and not resource hogs.

So if you are a cheap ass like me AVG is the product for you. It might not be the greatest and in anti-virus business there is no such thing as a great product. No product can protect you against all viruses and with few good practices you can reduce the possibility of been hit by a virus, worm or a trojan.

Another must is a firewall and I'll save that for another post.