AVG free edition has four main components which gives security for the home user. These four components and their functionality are as below.

1) Anti Spyware

Yes, AVG free edition comes with Anti-spyware software. So you need not to install anti-spyware software differently. AVG free edition detects all the spyware and adware.

2) Email Scanner

AVG provides security against email threat also. Incoming mails are automatically scanned by AVG free edition. AVG email scanner support external mail clients like Outlook Express and Thunderbird. It does not scan mails from GMail or Yahoo! mail.

3) Link Scanner

Link Scanner has two components, AVG search shield and AVG active surf shield. AVG search shield gives indication of the threat when you  are searching on the net using any search engine like Google, Yahoo! search or Windows Live. AVG active surf shield is not enabled in free edition. You need to purchase AVG professional edition to take advantage of surf shield. Surf shield blocks viruses at the time of browsing it self. So if you are downloading any virus by mistake at the time of browsing, AVG surf shield will stop it at that time only.

4) Resident Shield

Resident shield provides real time protection. Say you have downloaded a virus(some executable file) and you open it, resident shield will stop the process accessing that file. Resident shield scan each and every file when you access it.

For more detailed description and demonstration, check out the video.

What Is Spyware?

Spyware is a piece of software which is installed in your computer without your knowledge. Spyware performs some of the unwanted operations in your system like shows the unwanted ads, collect search or Internet activity information from your computer and change the configurations of some of the browsers. Spyware also makes it very difficult to reset browser to default or previous settings.

Not all the spyware softwares are harmful. Many companies uses spyware software to collect the information for marketing purpose. Usually when you install any software in your computer, you need to read terms and conditions. All companies will include the spyware warning in their terms of service. So these companies track your Internet activity to see your interest and shows related ads of your interest.

Spyware software installed not for legal use are very dangerous. These type of software can track the details from email and your personal chat to the information filled in the web browser form. Spyware is used for stealing your password and credit card information. This type of software has an ability to track the key stroke. Once all the information is collected, it is send to the developer of spyware. Then developer sell all those information and make money.

What Is The Difference Between A Computer Virus And Spyware?

Virus is a piece of software specially made to damage your computer or network connections. Virus replicates itself from one system to another. The main transport for spreading virus is Internet email. Some viruses find out the mail ids from your contact list of your email account and spread itself in attachment.

Spyware is made for not to damage your system but to steal the sensitive information from your computer. So spyware are not affecting your computer directly. Some spyware install the keylogger software and steals email id passwords and credit card information.

How Spyware Enters In Your Computer?

Spyware basically come to your system by your mistake. Some times it happens on the Internet that you find some very good trial offer of music software. You download it and click on “ACCEPT” button without reading any thing when it asked for accepting terms and condition. Even some anti-spyware softwares also include adware and shows ads on your computer. This way they earn the money on ads shown on your computer.

Many spyware developers take the benefit of security breach in the browser. You get a spam mail and in that you find a link. When you open that link, spyware will be automatically downloaded and installed without your knowledge.

How To Secure Your Computer From Spyware?

First step to secure your system from spywere is to prevent it entering to your system. When you download any software, always read terms of service before installing it. If it is installing spyware, stay away from that software.

Don’t open unknown mails. If you are using Internet Explorer(IE), then you need to think about changing the browser. You can use Firefox or Opera. IE has many vulnerabilities which makes easier for spyware to enter in to your system.

Install an anti-spyware software. Be careful while downloading anti-spyware software. Many anti-spyware software them selves are spyware. Always download anti-spyware software from know source like CNet. Always do research before downloading any software. Some of the softwares you can use are PC tools’s Spyware doctor and Trend Micro’s Hijack This.

I hope above information provides some basic of spyware and now onwards you will take proper steps to secure your system from spyware.

1) AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

When you talk about free antivirus software, AVG is on number one for providing free antivirus software. According to AVG terms and condition, AVG free edition is available only for home users. You can not use AVG free edition for office usage. AVG provides antivirus and anti spyware in free edition.

2) Avira Free AntiVirus

Avira anti virus is also a good software provides security for home users. As AVG this software is available only for home user. Avira has easy user interface and good detection level. Avira does not support POP or IMAP mail scanning.

3) Avast!

Avast is also available free of charge for home user and not for commercial user. Avast provides real time and mail scanning. Scheduling feature is not available in avast. Avast comes with skin-able interface so if you like to decorate your desktop than avast is for you.

4) Google Pack – Norton And PC tools SpyWare Doctor

You can use Google pack to take advantage of free security software available with it. To know more about Google pack visit my previous post Google Free Antivirus – Use Google Pack To Protect Your System

5) ClamWin

ClamWin is a open source software. You can use it freely any where even in your working environment. ClamWin has good detection level and supports mail scanning also. But it does not support real time scanning. The only benefit is you can use for your office use.

There are many other free antivirus software also available but I have included only widely used softwares. I hope you’ll find it useful.

Google pack was released in January, 2006. Google pack contains all basic softwares which users need in daily bases. Google pack includes Norton Security Scan and PC Tool’s Spyware Doctor for PC protection, Firefox with Google Toolbar and Google Toolbar for IE for better internet experience, Picasa photo organizer and Google photo screen saver, Star office for office documents, Real player, Adobe reader and Skype . This list may very from country to country.

At the time of Google pack release, Google was giving Norton Anti Virus 2005 Standard Edition for protection of system. This software was included with the six months of free virus database update. After that updates were not free. So Norton was not completely free as a part of Google pack at that time.

In March, 2007 Google included Norton Security Scan and PC Tool’s Spyware Doctor Standard Edition.

Norton Security Scan is completely free software provided by Google through Google pack. Norton Security Scan can detect viruses and remove them. Virus definition database is also updated automatically. It also has an ability to detect Spyware and Adware on your system. You can schedule your computer scanning with Norton Security Scan. The only thing I dislike about Norton Security Scan is that it’s not providing real time protection. Every time you will have to manually scan your system or schedule it. For getting real time protection you will have to upgrade software to a paid version.

Spyware Doctor is a good tool provides system protection against Spyware and Adware. It also update virus definition database automatically. It provides real time protection through File Guard. Here also for using Browser Guard, Network Guard and Process Guard real time protection, you will have to upgrade to paid version.

Overall Google provides good free anti virus software and anti spyware tool. Since it’s free, it’s definitely lacking of some features but it’s worth to give it a try.

After you are sure that there is a virus in your system, first thing you need to do is disconnect your system from the internet. There are many viruses, worms and Trojans which activates only when you are connected to the internet system.

Now download free anti virus software from the internet. Check out top 10 best anti virus programs. I suggest you to download trial professional version and not free version now. I am saying that because professional version has always higher detection ration than free version. You also need to download latest virus definition database. I’ll prefer to download kaspersky anti virus because I like it the most. Burn it to CD. Now install it on your system.

If your system is so badly infected that it doesn’t boot normally then you should try booting your system in to safe mode. If it’s not booting in to safe mode also then take some professional help.

After your computer has become virus free, consider purchasing anti virus software and use it. As it’s said prevention is better than cure, it’s always better to stop virus from entering in to system than removing it afterwards.

Look for the following symptoms which shows your computer is infected with viruses.

Your system has become very slow and hangs frequently. This is my personal experience. One of our users complained frequently that his system has become very slow. Since he was running very high CPU cycle application, I though it’s happening because of that only. Then the time came he refuses to work on that system and I ran anti virus program for the first time on that system.

Application works very strangely. For example Firefox doesn’t start up and gives error while starting. W32.USBWorm stops Firefox from running and gives error “I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…” .

Software programs crashes frequently.

Anti virus program doesn’t start at all. So this is also a one symptom in which virus disabled the anti virus software. You have anti virus software installed on your compute that doesn’t mean that you are 100% secured. But with anti virus software you are more secure than without.

Disk becomes unaccessible. Some viruses are there which can fill up all remaining space on the disk.

Different types of characters appear in the menu and also while writing in the note pad or word.

Dialog box come up while opening any drive ( double click on drive ) which asks for the application to select for opening that drive.

You notice that some programs are missing which you didn’t uninstall.

Your friends and relatives complains about the mails and instant messages which actually you have never send them.

IE home page changes to some page which you don’t want.

Well there are many other symptoms also which shows that your computer might be at risk. Each computer virus has it’s own functionality. Simple rule to check whether computer is infected with virus or not is that your computer doesn’t work as you want instead of having good hardware.

If you find any of above symptoms then you should consider installing anti virus software. If you already have anti virus program installed then you should consider trying other one.

1. Kaspersky
2. Bitdefender
3. ESET Nod32
4. AVG
5. Avast
6. Avira
7. Trend Micro
8. McAfee
9. Norton
10. Zone Alarm

This is just one of my beginning posts. Still many more to come. We are going to have full details on each of above anti virus with videos and many more. Need more information? Consider subscribing the RSS feed of this blog to make sure that you won’t miss out any of the important information about anti virus.

Of course not. If free antivirus softwares are as good as paid then nobody purchase paid anti virus softwares. Free antivirus softwares are lacking in many features. They just provide the basic protection of the systems. Free antivirus softwares are just a medium for company to promote their paid version of anti virus softwares. So definitely they are not going to provide full functionality in free version.

Free anti virus softwares are lacking in following features.

First their virus database is not as good as paid version of virus database. They just provide very basic level of virus database definition.

Free antivirus softwares are not providing real time scanning. Well some softwares of course provide real time of file scanning, but they don’t provide real time of web traffic scanning and Internet is the main source for getting your system infected with viruses.

No free antivirus software provides firewall protections. Firewall is also a main component for securing systems on the Internet.

There is no technical support available for free antivirus softwares. You need support if your data on computer is cirtical and your system is infected with virus.

No anti-spyware, anti-spam and anti-rootkit available in free version of anti virus softwares. You might need to install free version of anti-spyware and anti-spam softwares. As a result your system becomes damn slow. And that makes your system so slow that even some of viruses can’t make is so slow .

I highly recommend investing some money in anti virus software if you are using your system for work purpose. If you are using system just for playing games and just for entertainment purpose then free anti virus is a good choice.

Note : IE may take a while to download video. For better Internet experience use Firefox.

Let’s start with the brief history of computer viruses. In 1949 one mathematician wrote a computer program which had a capability of replicating it self. This types of programs can be compare with today’s computer viruses which also has the same ability to replicate. The first real computer virus, Brain seen in 1966 in the early days of MS DOS operating system. Brain was able to corrupt the boot sectors of the disk and was making data inaccessible. After that in 1988 Morris Warm appeared, which infected 6000 systems. With the increase popularity of WWW ( Internet ), virus programs also continue increasing. As of now almost 1 million viruses are available in Internet world.

Today there are many types of computer viruses available. These programs can damage your systems in many different ways. If you want to secure your system, you must install an anti virus program in your system. Anti virus is nothing but another types of programs which can disable virus programs from damaging your systems. Many people still don’t understand the importance of the anti virus softwares and they just keep using systems without anti virus softwares. Many people don’t know how to use anti virus effectively. As a result virus programs still damage their systems even if anti virus is installed.

I have created this site to help all those people who want to secure their systems but don’t know how to do it. Where to look for the anti virus softwares? Which anti virus softwares to use? How to use those anti virus softwares? All informations about free anti virus and best anti virus. This site provides information more for a common person and not for advance technical people. I will try to explain more and more through videos and images. So that a non technical person also can understand what I am talking about. This site will provide you a complete source of information for securing systems with anti virus softwares.

Since I am a system administrator, I know a little bit about anti virus programs. I hope I will be able to help you with my little knowledge. If you want to know more about me, go to About page. Please do visit again to get rock solid informations about anti virus and internet security.