3 Jan

Anti Virus Software

The anti-virus software market is extremely popular. There are 10+ large players in the industry and no one company really has a monopoly on the others. This is quite rare when it comes to computer software in general. There is normally always one major player but in the anti virus and virus scanning software market, there isn’t. With that said though, all of the virus protection applications that you can buy off the shelf at your local software store do pretty much exactly the same thing, they protect your computer from harmful computer viruses.

With this in mind, it doesn’t really matter so much which brand you buy. All that matters is that you buy one with a good virus definition database and more importantly, buy an application that offers free, daily updates. Computer viruses change vast with new ones being released daily, so you need to keep up to date. Some applications I have seen in the past charge you significant amounts to update your various patterns and definitions. This is something you need to look out for.

All virus prevention and scanning applications offer the basic service of identifying viruses within your system currently and also alert you should you try and open a file that contains a virus. Some of the more advanced and ultimately popular virus scanning applications such as BitDefender also contain malware, spyware and adware protection elements that take virus scanning a step further than the traditional sense by protecting you against online and web based threads. Some applications also feature anti-phishing tools in order to stop you giving out your personal data to those pretending to be someone else such as your bank for example.

Filed Under: Anti Virus Software

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26 Nov

BitDefender Virus Prevention Software

I have been using computers for the best part of 15 years, I have been online for at least 10 of those and during that time have tried many weird and wonderful virus scanners and virus prevention applications. I used to just use the free ones that you could download here and there but always found that the virus definition library was always a couple of years out of date. Pretty useless if you’re using the Internet and putting yourself at risk from viruses that were coded and released just yesterday. I have also tried some of the high end releases from Sophos and Norton and whilst they appeared to do a great job (touch wood), I don’t think they were worth the cost. However, one paid virus scanning application I can recommend is BitDefender.

I have been a user of this application for around 4 years now, mainly because it is very competitively priced admittedly but as well as that, it has all the features you would ever need in an anti virus application. The thing I like the most about BitDefender is that it just sits there running, in the background without taking up too much memory and I know it’s working for me. I feel safe. Almost every week it alerts me of threats when I visit certain websites and open certain files. I am just looking at the amount of viruses it has “caught” over the past month and it’s quite significant. I can only imagine what would have happened to my data and computer if I hadn’t had it running!

It also has a great anti phishing filter to protect me from malicious websites trying to coax me into entering my data - not that I’d fall for that anymore. I just think it’s a good all round application that does everything, stays updated and is priced very very competitively.