Antivirus for 2012
2012 is a new year full of new and old threats to your home and business computers. Virus makers (not to be confused with hackers) are hard at work to exploit whatever hole they can find in your computer security. What do we recommend to keep you safe?
MindFire is not a fan of some of the "well-known" software packages such as McAfee and Norton. We have seen many systems come into our shop or on business networks that were infected despite having these packages.
Instead, this year, we highly recommend the following:
The Full Monty for Powerful Machines
If you have a Windows 7 or Vista computer with plenty of disk space and memory, meaning there is no fear of a computer slowdown, our recommendation is F-Secure.
F-Secure is not to be confused with the well-known F-Prot that has been around for a while. F-Secure is a robust, monstrous defense machine. It's about $60 per year, like most other "paid" programs. I have seen it catch some recent and difficult infections where Norton and McAfee failed or were too late to stop a problem.
Middle of the Road
If you have a machine that you want to not even NOTICE it has Anti-virus or an older machine that needs something effective, but lighter in weight, I recommend Avira.
Avira has one of my favorite free antivirus programs. It's pretty light weight and does an excellent job. There are many others on this level though as well including AVG, our favorite from last year.
Free and Freaking Awesome
There are more and more free antivirus programs available and they get better every year. These are for home use only, but their "pay" versions are just as good, if not a little larger in size (meaning, slows your machine a bit).
Our favorite free antivirus for 2012 is Avast! Antivirus. We have really, really liked Avast for a while and we used it last year to insall on machines that had a problem with AVG for some reason. Avast just works and works extremely well.
AVG 2012 is quite good as well, though not our favorite.
