Antivirus, Antispyware, Firewall
Just recently the free version of Avast came top of the table in the on-demand detection rate for nasty software; this is a repeat of what happened in 2009. Every year twenty A-Listed antivirus products go against each other to find out which one has the greatest detection rate as well as numerous other tests such as scanning speed and resource usage. The antivirus programs that are submitted can be the free versions or the paid for variety and it is very impressive that a free antivirus product beat all the paid for versions.
You can view the comparison site here…
The twenty antivirus companies that were competing were…
- avast! Free Antivirus 5.0
- AVG Anti-Virus 9.0
- AVIRA AntiVir Premium 10.0
- BitDefender Antivirus 2011
- eScan Anti-Virus 10.0
- ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 4.2
- F-Secure Anti-Virus 2011
- G DATA AntiVirus 2011
- K7 TotalSecurity 10.0
- Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2011
- Kingsoft Antivirus 2010
- McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2010
- Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0 Free
- Norman Antivirus & Anti-Spyware 8.0
- Panda Antivirus Pro 2011
- PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AV 8.0
- Sophos Anti-Virus 9.5
- Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 2011
- Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2011
- TrustPort Antivirus 2010
Although avast do have a paid for product they were confident enough to use their freebie version against all the others which, apart from Microsoft Security Essentials, were all commercial products.
Get more information about Avast Antivirus here…
If you are the kind of computer user, who like me, knows they are at very little risk of actually getting a virus infection, then it can be annoying having to allocate large chunks for system resources to bloated security applications. In the last 10 years I have had one virus infection, so I know that my current AV software is over the top for my needs.
They get fat!
Several years ago, anti-virus software simply did what it said on the tin, it protected a PC from virus infections.
However, most of the big players have moved into the “security suite” arena, which supply not only AV utilities, but email scanning, instant messenger scanning, website security checks, keeping an eye on local network traffic, and monitoring P2P applications amongst other things.
Now I personally don’t need all of this protection thank you, and I really do not want to allocate system resources to this, I simply do not need them.
ClamWin to the rescue
So lately I have been looking around for a simple, reliable anti-virus application which does nothing else, just checks for virus infections, and I came across ClamWin. This is a very simple to use AV application, which keeps its own virus databases updated on-line, just like the big boys, but uses far less in the way of system resources.
Is there a downside?
Unfortunately there is a slight downside, although I personally am happy to live with it. ClamWin offers no real-time anti-virus protection.
Instead, it needs to be run regularly (and the task can be scheduled) to check the PC for viruses. This means you will not get those familiar AV alerts, when you download or access a file that has an infection, you will not know about the infection until you run the ClamWin scan.
Overall, ClamWin is perfect for me, as I know I am at a very low risk of actually coming across a virus anyway, so I simply schedule a weekly scan and carry on as normal. Other users such as me may find ClamWin to their liking also.
To get more information about ClamWin click here…
