More Free Protection for Your PC

A previous post on Frugal Fort Wayne discussed the merits and money savings of Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware program. One great way to complement Ad-Aware and create a one-two antivirus punch to protect your home desktop or laptop is to download AVG antivirus. You can download here: http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage . The theory behind having two or more antivirus programs on the same PC may seem a bit odd, but these two do carry subtle differences.

Without getting too geeky, Ad-Aware is a bit more internet and browser activity focused than AVG. In short, AVG is more of a comprehensive anti-virus protection for your PC while Ad-Aware is like using hand sanitizer after touching the icky internet. If your “friend” sends you a cute puppy video that ends up erasing you’re My Documents folder, hopefully AVG can help. If you were shopping for an iPad online and mistyped the web address and saw something horrible you can never un-see and now your internet explorer is full of pop-ups, then Ad-Aware should cure it.

The point of this post isn’t to teach how to run these programs or use them, both have supportive websites and documentation. This was meant for those of you who may have Norton antivirus or McAfee antivirus. It’s not a shot at those programs, both are excellent. But Norton’s latest Norton 360 has a premier edition that runs you $99 bucks. McAfee’s Total Protection 2011 is only $45, but that’s on sale from $90. A lot of what you are paying for is the fact that you have no clue what you are paying for. A simple investment of time and study (both free) will increase your computer skills to where you can confidently protect yourself in an inexpensive way.

If you need proof, yours truly spent five years in the IT field. We have had the same computer running the same build of Windows XP for about the same amount of time. Never paid a dime for antivirus or internet security software. We had one major virus which was repaired with a little time spent on Google and a couple beers. If you still don’t think you can remove viruses on your own with AVG or Ad-Aware, you probably at least know someone with tech skills who would help…and they might like beer.