Free Virus Protection Package for Windows - The anti-virus software
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This is one of your first lines of defense in the world of the computer. It scans the system for known virus codes. Once it has found a virus, it will tag its location, and depending on your virus and your software, it may even get rid of the virus software without any extra outside prompting. At the very least, it will identify your virus so that you can find the correct method of eliminating the malicious code.
The recommendation for this one is Clamwin. Clamwin is a free and open source virus protection application that you can use to scan your system. The software is not particularly large by itself, but you may find that the virus defining updates can take a while. It will update once initially after you install it, but after that you are the one who has to remember to update it manually at regular intervals. I suggest that you put it in your calendar. Overall, this software will do the job more than adequately. It is also relatively user-friendly and will even add icons to as many places as you want it to.
Now it is time to move on to your firewall package. Since I am not a complete and total sadist and I do not want to take up all of the space left on your hard drive in order to protect it -- after all, that would just defeat the point of all of this protection -- I am going to give you the other things that you need with the firewall software. I'll keep it nice and simple for my favorite readers. The suite that we are going to use to cover the rest of the bases is called AVG Free, and it comes with some other pretty important protection on board.
It comes with your firewall, of course, which helps you to keep out sneaky back door attacks on any open parts of your machine.
Next is the spam filter. You hate spam, don’t you? Of course you do. We all hate that annoying and worthless waste of text that wiggles its way into our inboxes daily. Any extra levels of protection that you can put between the annoyances and your very own eyeballs is worthwhile. Bye, bye spam, hello check inbox. I do not think that we really need to cover the concept in too much detail since most of us know what a spam filter is already.
Chat and instant messaging protection is probably something that you may not give a lot of thought; after all, only a very few people think of that as a potential security threat to their system, but the truth is that when you open up access between two machines you are leaving yourself with a potential vulnerability. The great news is that AVG Free can help to protect your system. The bad news is that it will only protect you from the hazards while chatting with ICQ or MSN Messenger, which is not really a wide range of services, and bypasses altogether protection for what is arguably the most popular instant messaging system on the planet: AOL’s AIM.
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