"Antivirus Software - Secrets to Protect Your PC Against Viruses?"
Why we need antivirus software?
It's because the most commonly used method of protecting against and detecting viruses is to purchase (or download) and install antivirus program designed to scan for all types of viruses.
What is the Antivirus Program use for?
Antivirus software programs are capable of detecting known viruses and protecting your system against new, unknown viruses. These programs check your system for viruses each time your system is booted and can be configured to check any programs you download from the Internet, as well. Any viruses detected will be removed.
There are quite a lot of antivirus programs available in the market, among them are:
Panda Antivirus + Firewall (www.pandasoftware.com)
AVG (www.avg.com)
PC-Cillin (www.trendmicro.com)
Avast! (www.avast.com)
Norman (www.norman.com)
F-PROT Antivirus
etc
Note that listed here are just some of the antivirus company. You may also notices that not all the antivirus programs are free. There are few types actually:
Completely free edition antivirus (mostly offer by new company) or their have another professional edition that you need to pay
Offer a certain periods of free trial then you needs to pay if you decide to continue using it
Pay / Subscription-based antivirus
4 Secrets to Protect Your PC Against Viruses
To know whether your computer is protected against viruses and other threats, you need to know for certain whether you have antivirus program installed on your computer. Not only that, you need to know whether your antivirus program is actually working properly, the program version and the virus definition is up to date.
Secret 1: To check the antivirus program on your computer
Click the Start button, go to All Programs and look for the antivirus program that you have installed. Normally, the started antivirus program will placed an icon on the system tray.
Secret 2: To determining the version of antivirus software
You should see the brand name and the version of the antivirus software on the splash screen when the program startup, on the system tray icon, or the desktop icon of the program.
Secret 3: To figure out the virus definition
Depending on which antivirus program you have, this might be displayed on the configuration or settings screen.
It could be in Help menu About option, or in the About option from the system tray as every antivirus program displays this information a little differently.
Whichever antivirus program you choose, you'll need to go online periodically to update the virus definition database that the program uses so that the program can catch the latest virus files. As new viruses are created every day, this file of known viruses must be updated accordingly.
If the date of the last update is within the past couple of weeks, then you can be pretty sure that your antivirus software is working okay, at least up to that date.
Secret 4: To know when the last scan occurred
Most of the time you need to scan your computer drives manually, so make sure you scan your computer periodically, at least once a month. Form a habit to update your virus definitions first, and then scan the computer for viruses.
With these 4 secrets in mind, you computer can be more secured from viruses. Of course the antivirus software that you installed in your computer also play a vital roles.
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