Does the thought of getting free virus protection conjure images of trying to hold back a flood with a chain-link fence? Would you believe me if I told you that there is no big advantage to paying for your antivirus program? Let me explain a little bit about how antivirus programs work and then see if I can convince you that free virus protection is not a bad thing.

All antivirus programs have two components. The first is an engine that is used to find all the files on your computer. The engine does not get many upgrades, its job is to systematically go through all the files on your computer and scan them. As each file is scanned, it is then compared to a list of bad things to look for. This is where the second part comes in, the virus signature file. The virus signature file is a specific list of things that the program looks for that will identify the bad files to get rid of. The signature may be a certain file name in a specific place or it could be the size and location of a file that is a known to be bad. You get the idea; one part scans the files and compares them to the second part, the list of “bad things”. It works just like cashing a check at the grocery store, the cashier is the engine and looks at the check and then opens a list of known bad check writers (the signature file) to make sure you are not on it.

Now that you know how it works, it is easy to see that once you have a good engine or cashier, there is not much reason to upgrade or update it. On the other hand, the importance of the virus signature file or list of bad check writers is critical to have updated. This is where most people go wrong; they don’t update their antivirus program and are using a very old signature file. New viruses come out each week and it is important to keep this list (the virus signature file) updated often so that you have the best protection. I have seen people not update their virus program for over a year and then get a virus and blame their antivirus program… kind of silly eh?

Now that you know how an antivirus program works, let’s discuss free virus protection programs against the full pay-for versions. Now first ask yourself, if you were trying to sell an antivirus program and you wanted people to try out your software, would you make the trial version poorly so it didn’t work very well? If you did that, who would ever buy the pay-for version? What the software companies do is give you a different version of the scanning engine, or to fit the analogy that we are using here, a different cashier. The paid-for engine will scan incoming email, scan the website you want to open and even scan files that you download. The free engine will just scan the files on your computer. The virus signature file is the same for both, since they want BOTH versions of the software to work, but they want to give you more features with the paid-for version. If you use the free virus protection version, and you update and scan your computer once a week, chances are you will not have a virus issue. Now obviously there are new viruses that are so new, the antivirus companies have not had time to defend against them. There are also some websites that get you to click on things and mislead you into installing the worst virus programs on your computer but neither version of protection can defend against everything.

So the moral of the story is this: free virus protection works and most antivirus programs have a yearly free trial that you can download and use to protect your computer. I try and stay away from the two big products like Norton and McAfee since virus writers tend to write viruses that resist or disable those products. Think about it, if you are going to create an evil virus, you want your virus to be able to get past the most popular protection software products! Norton and McAfee are the two most popular antivirus products. I favor the up and coming antivirus companies. If you look at some independent studies, you will find that these products are doing very well and are often much more effective than the big two.

Check your computer, if you don’t have an antivirus program, check out the website below where you will find links to several free virus protection products. If your computer has not been infected by a virus yet, it eventually will be. Get your computer protected now so you don’t have to worry about dealing with a computer virus, or worse yet….losing all the pictures and other files that you have stored on your computer.