You have a computer and an online connection, but you are afraid to use it because you are not protected from online viruses. Worse, you are flat broke, and you won’t have the money to pay for virus protection until you find a job, which you hoped to use the Internet to help you do. What is a person to do in this situation? Well, one option is to download a free anti-virus program and then surf away. But where will you find a free anti-virus program? That’s what this article is going to tell you.
The only place that you are going to find a free anti-virus program is on the Internet. This does put you in a dilemma because you will have to be online, unprotected, while you are searching. You don’t want to spend much time surfing around looking from programs, instead, go in with a website of a program that you would like to download. One of the best free anti-virus programs the AntiVir Personal Edition Classic program. To access this program, you can go to Avira. This website offers free downloads right from the home page; within minutes you can be surfing the web, protected from viruses and with an easy mind.
Of course, Free-Av of Avira is not the only site on the Internet offering free anti-virus protection. Another company that offers highly ranked free programs is AVAST. You can go to that site by clicking on Avast. The AVAST programs didn’t catch quite as many of the viruses as the AntiVir programs did in a head-to-head test. Still, there are some advantages to using AVAST; one is that there is phone-based technical assistance available. However, the technical assistance is not free; you will be charged for phone calls to the help desk. Another benefit of AVAST is that it offers protection for Windows Vista. Not all programs do yet.
Another option for getting free anti-virus software is to check out one of the free offers from a commercial software company. If you want protection against spyware and adware, this might be your best bet. The previously mentioned companies do a great job of detecting viruses (about 90% of all viruses get zapped), however, they don’t do such a great job of detecting spyware (about 30% of all spyware programs get zapped). Commercial programs such as McAfee and Norton will protect your computer from all malware that it might encounter.
Different offers are offered by different software companies at different times. At any time, you should be able to find a 14 day free-trial offer, once in a while you might find offers for as long as 30 or 60 days. To check out the free offers for Norton software, go to Symantec; to check on the availability of McAfee you can go to McAfee.
You might also try going to thefreesite.com and looking at all of the programs they offer. You will find free downloads for anti-virus software and you will find programs that can remove (some) viruses from your computer after you get a virus. This site even offers some of the commercial anti-virus software for free. Check out the free Norton anti-virus software that you can get for participation in an online survey. Sure, you have to do something for that software so it technically isn’t free. But, if you are broke and looking to go online, it is probably free enough.
Like anything else on the Internet, your best bet for finding information might be to go to your favorite search engine and type in something like “free antivirus software”. However, remember to only do this if you are on a computer that is already protected.