Computer virus should be easy to understand. It is essentially an unwanted piece of software that’s get loaded onto our PC and does potentially dangerous things. Just like living organisms, it could replicate itself by infecting specific files and spreading to hunt for other healthy files. There are a few ways viruses could get onto our computer. Likely sources are email attachments, removable USB drives, files we download in the Internet and flaws in our operating system that can be exploited by malicious individuals.
Once viruses infect our PC, there could be a variety of effects that could happen. Some viruses are actually quite benign, but others could render our PC unusable. For this reason, we need an antivirus software that can protect ourselves from these bad codes. Reliable antivirus software should detect and remove any known virus. There are multiple excellent packages that are relatively affordable. Some packages are available for commercial uses and others are free for home uses.
To prevent viruses from harming our personal computer, we should check recommendations from experts and find out whether specific antivirus software could work well to deal with latest intrusions. Some experts and magazines regularly issue a list of best antivirus solutions in the market. Before we do this, we need to make sure that our antivirus software is properly set up to deal with latest intrusions in the market. It should be able to regularly contact its remote server and perform regular virus database updates and upgrades on the antivirus software itself.
Some updates are available through annual subscription basis and we should consider things that we could get from a commercial-based software. In reality, many free solutions in the market are good enough to provide us with great overall protection. In this case, we need to make sure that our subscription is renewed properly when it expires. AVG Anti Virus Free Edition is an example of free products that offer software updates at no cost.
The antivirus software should perform an automatic virus scan on the entire system about once each week. This is especially true if we surf the Internet quite extensively. In fact, people who regularly visit questionable websites and download risky files should consider scanning their computers once a day. It would be regretful if our computer is infected by virus due to our carelessness. There are things we can do to avoid such a digital calamity.
The robustness of an antivirus software is determined by the effort provided by the developers. It takes persistence to continuously monitor the Internet and check for new variants of different viruses. This software usually includes a feature that allows us to report any suspicious files or viruses that can’t be eradicated successfully by the software. We should try to contribute by reporting anything suspicious we find while we are travelling within the cyberspace. There’s nothing to gain by not contributing, because we may get direct answer for problems that we have in our computer.