Antivirus Software

I believe that human beings have a dual personality: they are half good and half evil. Sometimes the good half prevails and then that person is good and some others are bad. Of course they are not entirely bad, as they still have some goodness left in their structure, but they are capable of bad things. I am telling you this as every time somebody does something really good to help people, somebody else will immediately find a bad use for that exact thing.That was the case with all discoveries, especially the atomic power that can be used to obtain a lot of energy and help a lot of people, but nevertheless is it most known for the atomic bomb that killed millions of innocent people.

The examples could go on for ever but today I am going to talk only about antivirus software. As soon as the computer was invented and it worked only with the appropriate software, some person immediately thought of a trick and infect that software in order to harm the computer it operated. That infectious and malicious software created was called in a medical term: "a computer virus" as it spread from one infected computer to another as quickly as a virus. Of course some other people had to use their beautiful minds and find a cure for these viruses. This is the way the antivirus software appeared somewhere in the late eighties.

The antivirus or anti-virus software is that particular software that is able to detect and remove all malware that will potentially harm your computer. Even if there are a lot of types of computer viruses, a good antivirus software can detect them all , including computer viruses, worms and trojans. There are three basic ways of detecting the threats for your computer that the antivirus software uses: the signature of the virus, the heuristics and the file emulation. The first one uses the signature left by the known computer viruses. The antivirus software records the signatures of all the known viruses in the data base and scans all the downloads and connections to the internet of the computer and when it detects such a signature, it immediately isolates it and warns you about this threat. You can quaranteen the file or delete it permanently from your computer. The second one is based on the antivirus software trying to identify only a part of the known malicious code, especially in the case of new viruses that are not recorded yet. The last method is about running the possibly threatening software in a secure virtual space and seing what happens and how it works. According to this the antivirus software is capable to decide if it is malicious or not.



Before the internet appeared the computer viruses were spread with the help of floppy disks that were used to transfer data from one computer to another. However, this way of spreading them was very slow and back then computer viruses were only pranks merely. But the internet meant an instant spread of these viruses on the unprotected computers. they also evolved from almost innocent jokes to very dangerous softwear that could seriously harm your computer by deleting vital files or even "stealing" the data on your computer or even your identity. That is why the antivirus software had to be constantly improving, too.

The older versions of antivirus software used to slow down your computer while scanning for potential harm. But the latest versions no longer cause this inconvenient and are a lot more capable than the old ones.

Here is an alphabetical list with the most known sntivirus software: AOL Active Virus shield, Avast, AVG, Avira, BitDefender, BullGuard, CA Antivirus, Clam antivirus, ClamWin, Comodo antivirus, Dr. Web, F-Prot, F-Secure, Fortinet, G DATA software, Graugon antivirus, Intego Virus Barrier , Kaspersky antivirus, McAfee virus scan, Microsoft security essentials, ESET NOD 32, Norman, Panda antivirus, Panda cloud antivirus, PC tools antivirus, Quick heal antivirus, Sophos anti-virus, Symantec Norton antivirus , Trend micro internet security, Vba 32 antivirus, Sunbelt software, Virus buster, Zone alarm antivirus.



Here is another list with available antivirus software that you can download, some of which for free.

According to the specialists' testing and reviews Norton Antivirus 2010 is the best antivirus software , followed closely by NOD32 antivirus version 4, Kaspersky antivirus 2010 and BitDefender antivirus 2010.

I will tell you a few words about the winner before I finish this presentaion article. Beside being the best rated antivirus software, Norton antivirus 2010 is also the best -selling security software in the world. It is really easy to install and besides, it only takes less than a minute to do so. You don't have to reboot your computer to make it run. The interface is very much like the version of 2009 . However, it still has some new features that are actually built on the ones present last year, too like: Norton download insight and Norton File insight that warn you about the eventual threat detected when you download some files or  access an insecure internet page. This new improved version is also laptop friendly, as it may postpone some tasks until later, when the battery life will be charged , this in case the battery is almost empty. This software also improved its scanning speed for all the three options: Quick scan, Full system scan and Custom scan. There are also some other new features regarding a better the degree of certainty about the trustworthiness of some files that used to be in the grey area of uncertainty: Norton insight network and SONAR 2. It preserves the feature that was new last year - the Pulse update that is used to automatically download new definitions of viruses every six minutes, thus offering the most up-to-date data base of antivirus software. It is important for an antivirus software to work properly , but also to work at a good speed and not slow down the computer while scanning files. Apparently Norton 2010 is very good from this point of view, too.



Help is important especially for new and unexperienced users, that is why the official website of Symantec offers all the online support you need. There is free chat, email and telephone support , too.

The bottomline is that this is declared the best antivirus software of the year 2010 and it really proves to be the best from all points of view.