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Note: This article was originally written for The Information Bank. Because of the high volume of related posts, I've decided to move the articles here.

We all (or I hope we all) know about the basics of computer optimization protection: anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, and updates. Unfortunately, many do not realize that these protections are available for free. No need to buy McAfee or Norton! Although I believe that these are outstanding products, I get comparable (and often better) performance from simple, basic, no-frills free protection.

The security measure that I will be focusing on today is anti-virus. Now, I have used a variety of virus scanners since the 90s but they all had their problems.

• Micosoft Virus Scanner could not even update it’s virus database let alone clean a simple DOS virus.
• McAfee and Norton is bloated with features and code that significantly slow my computer’s performance. Additionally, I’ve found that both are better at finding viruses then cleaning them. Often, my friends would get a dialog box that said, “xxxx virus has been found in xxxx.” When they pressed “Heal,” the program would inform that it was not possible. What’s the point of having a virus scanner!
• Free Online Virus Scanners do not have enough access to completely scan computers. They also do not have real-time virus scanning shields.

Then there’s Grisoft. Grisoft is a company that markets AVG Anti-Virus for a variety of applications. They also offer a free anti-virus solution for home users. Now why would a for-profit, commercial organization do that? I’m suspecting that they want to raise awareness of their product and make it a natural decision for system administrators to choose Grisoft for their multiple anti-virus license needs.

Not only is it free, it is fast and seamless. On The Screen Savers (when it was still awesome), Kevin Rose said that you hardly notice any performance difference. I totally agree with him. The real-time AVG Resident Shield scans every resource that is used. I though that this would cause a significant slowdown. But, I barely noticed anything! It has never even taken 5% of my processing power!

Other than the fact that it is free and seamless, there is nothing really different about AVG that sets it apart from McAfee and Norton. Additionally, there is nothing that makes McAfee and Norton better than AVG. It is a full featured anti-virus suite with a real-time virus-scanning background process, an automatic email scanner, an automatic update, a scheduler, and, of course, a normal manual virus scanner.

Watch for my next articles on other freeware computer protection measures!

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