Since virus and other malware threats are on the rise more than ever, you might be wondering about which antivirus software to use to keep your system healthy and infection free.

There are several very good antivirus makers in the Market and we see each of them claims to be the world leader in computer and network security software.

Don’t get distracted by these claims, it is really important to invest in antivirus software. On a basic level, I am sure you will not want your online games to be ruined due to some nasty virus remaining undetected by your free security software having some limitations.

Almost all the antivirus maker companies keep their product latest with constantly updated database of virus definitions and product patches. Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro are some of the reputed ones that we are familiar with. I have myself tried and tested various antivirus products and I sincerely feel the need of a good antivirus scanner. What people want to see in a pc security product is:

  • A good fast scanning engine
  • Ability to detect and clean viruses easily even the latest ones we hear in news (remember conficker!), high detection rates in other words
  • Faster and lighter updates
  • Easy to configure

A good antivirus is found to have the following essential characteristics:

Good detection rate: An antivirus scanner should be able to detect all types of viruses not only in uncompressed form but also in compressed form. It is an essential criteria for a good antivirus scanner.

It shouldn’t be a system resource hogger: A good antivirus software shouldn’t eat up a lot of your system resources. This is especially important for barebone systems which do not have high processing powers and oodles of ram.

Scanning features: Ability to scan boot sectors, scanning before startups, Creating emergency diskettes, Auto protection, scanning within compressed files, heuristic scanning, scanning emails and scheduling of scans, taskbased scanning, scanning downloads, ability to recover virus-infected files, variety of scanning options like including and excluding specific file types and generation of scan reports, creation of scan logs.

Ease of use: It should be easier to use and fairly understandable and configurable even by novices and non-technical users.

Just installing an Antivirus product is not sufficient, you must configure it properly according to your requirements. An improperly configured antivirus will not work at its’ optimum. Staying up to date with latest virus definitions must also not be overlooked. The two Antivirus products that I have found very good to use for a personal computer or SOHO or a small company network are Bitdefender Antivirus, Kaspersky Antivirus and Nod32. They scan very fast without hogging up the system resources and are easy to update even on a dialup connection. If you are a general home pc user and use the computer for normal day to day activities like surfing, checking emails etc…

Try Bitdefender Antivirus
It even includes spyware scanning and detection capabilities.

On the other hand, if you are a bit advanced user, Kaspersky antivirus is the way to go. It has a very fast scanning engine and comparatively better detection rate than many other good antivirus products.

Lastly, if you are fairy geeky and need a faster and sleaker antivirus, give NOD32 a try. It won’t disappoint you.

Lets’ attack malware now!