Many people do not know that there are free antivirus programs for home use that protect you just as much as the paid versions. Many times I find clients with expensive, buggy and bloated internet security programs that are beyond necessary and sometimes cause older computers to grind to a sluggish crawl. In these cases I might even recommend removing the security suite altogether and installing a simple and free antivirus program. I would also recommend installing some free anti-malware software as well.

Which free antivirus do I recommend most? In my experience, I have had good results with the free home edition of Alwil’s Avast antivirus program. One of the main benefits of this program is to run a full scan of the computer before windows boots up. If a computer is infected with certain viruses, they can mask themselves as windows processes and avoid detection or removal because of the operating system protecting itself. Avast effectively finds and removes these viruses before they can protect themselves by scanning before windows starts. I have also found Avast to be very effective in protecting against and removing trojans which are some of the nastiest bugs around. It is ranked second on PC World’s Free Antivirus Software rankings.

Which other malware protection would I recommend? Unlike antivirus programs, you can have multiple spyware and adware protection programs installed at once on a computer. The best programs to have are Spybot Search and Destroy and Malwarebytes anti-malware free version.

Spybot Search and Destroy allows you to detect a wide variety of malware programs and other files and also gives you a tool that notifies you of any registry change. The registry change notification can be a useful tool but to the average user it may be more of an annoyance better left turned off. I usually use Spybot to scan periodically and leave the notifications off.

Malwarebytes anti-malware is a program I have found effective at detecting and removing phony security programs that claim you have a virus so they can install malware on your computer. After you allow such a phony program to install itself, it installs other malware and usually slows the computer to a crawl. Malwarebytes has a free version which will detect and remove these fake security programs.

If you have an Internet Security suite you have subscribed to and it hasn’t significantly slowed your pc down then you may decide to keep it installed until the subscription runs out. If you want to increase performance I would recommend going with these free and effective tools for your home computer. The general trend with these security products is to offer free protection for home use because it benefits home users as well as internet service providers and the overall security of the internet.

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