How To Get Free Antivirus Software

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The internet is a big place. For the most part, it is filled to the brim with useful information and excellent entertainment. Places like Youtube and Facebook can provide hours of enjoyment, keep you in touch with friends and bring you the latest news. But for every good site, there are dozens of shady places laden with pop-up ads, spyware and viruses. Commercial antivirus software can cost hundreds, but you can get commercial level protection for free. Here is a short guide on how to get protection without breaking your wallet.

Free Option - Protection without payment

There are several well known antivirus providers that offer free products, often as limited versions of their retail program. A quick search will usually turn up most of the big names in free protection. AVG is the most well known in this category, with a free product that offers basic web protection, as well as a premium edition available for purchase. A possible upside is that a company that creates antivirus software that people are willing to pay for can likely deliver a quality product. A possible downside, of course, is that they also cut out features as incentive to upgrade. While the features in question are sometimes unnecessary for the average web browser, some free programs can lack necessary features. Consider the feature list carefully before you dedicate time and bandwidth to your download.

Be wary of fake 'antivirus' programs. They claim to scan your system, only to tell you that you have a dangerous virus that can only be removed by their special program at cost. This is a common scam, and chances are the virus in question was put there by the fake program to begin with or is not there at all. Always check around to make sure the program you are looking at is trustworthy.

A pound of cure - free choices for virus removal

If your computer is already infected, you may be looking at paying up for premium protection, or worse, for a technician to fix your computer. But before you open your wallet, take a look around for free virus removal utilities. Unlike antivirus programs, many of these are relatively small companies or personal projects, frequently working off of donations. One common example is Spybot Search & Destroy, a useful program that removes and protects against spyware and 'malware', the smaller brothers of the standard computer virus. While it is less likely to fix a major virus, Spybot S&D can be a useful tool to remove bad cookies and hidden monitoring programs. For bigger problems, there are many virus-specific utilities out there, frequently coded by plucky programmers after an encounter with the virus in question. While they take a little experience to use, they can save you a lot of money in computer shop visits in the long run.

While antivirus removal was once a costly thing, the advent of freeware and the spread of programming skills to the masses have created a plethora of free solutions. There is no one antivirus that can be safely labeled 'the best', so it falls to the consumer to know which programs suit their needs. Nowhere is the phrase 'knowledge is power' truer than the internet, and the knowledge of free antivirus protection is a fearsome power indeed.

Commercial antivirus software can cost hundreds, but you can get commercial power for free