Free Antivirus

You Can Use Free Antivirus Software to Help Fix Problems

There are many places on the internet to acquire free antivirus software for use on your home or business computer. However, it pays to know the ins and outs of this type of software before attempting to install or use it.

It is important to remember that all virus software needs to be consistently updated in order to be useful. Simply having the software on your computer may be good at first, but as viruses change and mutate and new ones come into being, it is vital that your computer’s antivirus programs be regularly updated to make sure that “new and improved” viruses are caught.

Free antivirus software can comes, generally, in two forms: the first is demo or beta versions of popular software developed by major manufacturers. Many large companies, such as Norton and McAffee, offer free trials of their software or smaller, less functional versions for free download. These versions, while sometimes not quite as useful as their for-pay counterparts, are 100% safe and will do an excellent job of isolating and removing the viruses that the program knows.

On the flip side, if you choose to download free antivirus software from a software maker that you don’t recognize or that looks somewhat suspicious, be aware that you may run the risk of downloading malware claiming to be antiviral software. In other words, you think you are downloading antivirus software, when what you’re really doing is downloading a virus onto your computer. While the odds of this are very low, you will minimize your risk of this by only downloading free software from vendors that you are familiar with. A quick check of the major antivirus software brands at your local computer store will familiarize you with the brands that are used and trusted most.

This type of reliable, free software, while not always providing all the functionality or expandability of the traditional antivirus software packages, can go a long way toward ridding your computer of viral software. At the very least, they will tell you whether your computer is infected or not and what to do and where to go to correct the problems.