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Safeguard Your Computer With Antivirus Software Computers run such a lot of our lives nowadays. They run our payroll, our bank account, our school and company records, our governments and, for lots of individuals, our entertainment, so anything that disrupts computers has the potential to entirely screw up our lives temporarily. This state of affairs is awful enough, but there are also people out there who get their kicks out of writing and releasing viruses to infect our computers and screw up our lives. I am not talking of criminals, we have always had to put up with them, I mean kids and others who compose and release viruses to attack our computers for fun. These days, lots of families are dispersed because members have travelled to other cities to study or work and occasionally this means going to other countries too. Most of these people rely on computers and the Internet to keep in touch. A infection could mean the disruption of these contacts and even the destruction of family photo albums. You might conclude that we rely on computers too much and lots of people would agree with you, particularly those who have lost crucial data to computer viruses. At worst, you could have your identity stolen and have our financial life completely disrupted, but even losing your computer for a few days while it is repaired 'in the shop' is bad enough. In my case, this would mean loss of income, for others it may mean a violation of privacy or even theft. So, what can we do to protect ourselves? Antivirus software is the solution. Antivirus software used to mean a program to scan files coming into your computer, but these days it means far more. Good AV software will now include a firewall to

Protect Your Computer With Antivirus Software

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Computers run so much of our lives nowadays. They run our payroll, our bank account, our school and business records, our governments and, for lots of individuals, our entertainment, so anything that disrupts computers has the potential to completely muck up our lives temporarily.

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Page 1: Protect Your Computer With Antivirus Software

Safeguard Your Computer With Antivirus Software

Computers run such a lot of our lives nowadays. They run our payroll, our bank account, our school and company records, our governments and, for lots of individuals, our entertainment, so anything that disrupts computers has the potential to entirely screw up our lives temporarily.

This state of affairs is awful enough, but there are also people out there who get their kicks out of writing and releasing viruses to infect our computers and screw up our lives. I am not talking of criminals, we have always had to put up with them, I mean kids and others who compose and release viruses to attack our computers for fun.

These days, lots of families are dispersed because members have travelled to other cities to study or work and occasionally this means going to other countries too. Most of these people rely on computers and the Internet to keep in touch. A infection could mean the disruption of these contacts and even the destruction of family photo albums.

You might conclude that we rely on computers too much and lots of people would agree with you, particularly those who have lost crucial data to computer viruses. At worst, you could have your identity stolen and have our financial life completely disrupted, but even losing your computer for a few days while it is repaired 'in the shop' is bad enough.

In my case, this would mean loss of income, for others it may mean a violation of privacy or even theft. So, what can we do to protect ourselves?

Antivirus software is the solution.

Antivirus software used to mean a program to scan files coming into your computer, but these days it means far more. Good AV software will now include a firewall to protect your computer from being hacked and a malware scanner to prevent incoming files from dropping trojans and worms etc onto your hard disk.

These small programs can read the keys that you press and send the data back to their creator. These key presses can be analyzed to disclose your requirements on search engines (in order to spam you) or your log in particulars to your bank (in order to steal from you).

So, you have to install either a good antivirus software suite, which will include all of the above or you can get the components individually. Not so long ago, you would have had to buy all these things, but now some are built into Windows. Windows now comes with a firewall and antivirus software, which will also scan email.

This is good enough for most users, but if you would like to take your computer's safety to a higher level, you should add a dedicated malware scanner, of which there are many good free ones. If you consider that it takes too much time to run two or three separate programs and keep them up to date or if you want a higher degree of security, you might think about buying an AV software suite.

Page 2: Protect Your Computer With Antivirus Software

There are plenty of good ones like Norton, Nod, Kaspersky and others which cost little more than $30 a year for absolute peace of mind.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the network antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our web site now at Computer Antivirus Software