As I’m sure you know… or hopefully know, it’s very important to have an effective antivirus program installed on your computer to help keep you protected from all the bad things you run into online and in your email. There are a growing number of threats online and you need to have some sort of defense against these types of attacks on your computer. And it’s not just viruses you need to worry about; you need to have malware protection as well.
Now there are many well known antivirus software vendors out there such as Norton and McAfee and they do a good job for the most part. But just because they are the big players doesn’t mean that they are the solution for you. Many times these programs take over your computer and can slow it down or prompt you asking for permission to do all sorts of things. This may be ok for a novice but if you know what you are doing then it can be a pain.
There are also a few free antivirus solutions out there but you never know what you are getting when you use free software and if you are really covered. Avira offers antivirus solutions for home and corporate users including a server based management console where you can manage all your endpoints. Avira’s antivirus software does a pretty good job of discovering viruses, malware and even protects your web browsing experience by blocking known bad websites.
For the home user they have a pay for product as well as a free version that you can use to protect your computer. The main differences are the paid for version can do the following:
- Doesn’t have popups
- Does a better job of detecting malware
- Allows you to schedule updates as often as you want
- Has real time repair and delete option of infected files
- Has an email scanner
- Has a web scanner
But the free version does offer nice features such as real time protection that constantly monitors your computer for things such as Trojans, rootkits, viruses and worms. It also features Browser Tracking Blocker which helps protect you from online sites trying to track your web activities. It has a decent spyware engine as well to keep malware off of your computer. The Website Safety Advisor rates the Security of websites in your search results to keep you away from inappropriate pages.
Avira Free will run on 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8. It requires 1GB of RAM for Windows 7 & 8 and 512MB of RAM for Windows XP. You will also need 150MB of free disk space on your computer. So if you are looking for a free antivirus solution and don’t mind the occasional popups then you should give Avira Free antivirus a try. There are some websites out there that have instructions on how to disable the popups but some of them are only for certain versions of Windows and they may or may not work for you. You can download Avira Free and check it out for yourself at their website.