AVG free edition provides good security for home users. With AVG free edition, you will get regular updates also freely.  In this post, I am going to talk about what AVG free edition provides and how to secure your system using avg free edition.

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.

Antivirus software are an important part of an operating system. You should not use any Windows system without installing antivirus software. If you don’t want to purchase any paid antiviurs software, you should install a free antivirus software available. There are so many free antivirus software available on the internet. I have made a list of few free antivirus for XP.

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 Free antivirus comes with Google pack. Google pack actually includes 3rd party softwares for computer protections.

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.

Not only about anti virus, in any field people always look for free. If some thing is available freely than why to spend money on that thing. There are many kind of free anti virus softwares available on the Internet. Have you ever think how effective these softwares are? Are these softwares as good as paid anti virus softwares.

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.

AVG anti virus is a free available anti virus on the internet. If you do Google for “free antivirus”, the first result comes up is from AVG web site. AVG anti-virus free edition 7.5.519 is the top rated free anti virus from CNET. Since it’s free I have downloaded it and checked it. I have also made a video about installation. I hope you will enjoy this video.

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

This is the my first post on the Anti-Virus-And-Internet-Security.com. First, I would like to welcome you on the blog. In this post I will give you basic information about the anti virus and internet security. I would also tell you why I created this blog.

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.