Virus protection
A personal recommendation

I will first of all say I am no expert when it comes to computer protection but as a fairly average computer user thought it would be useful to share the following with others.

Viruses and the like have not often plagued me, until recently. I read the other day that 2007 saw a gigantic surge in the number of new viruses and trojans being detected and frankly, this does not surprise me.

Over the past month I have been hit twice by particularly nasty viruses, one of which appeared to totally knock out a computer less than two years old by getting into the BIOS. I shall not dwell on that except it should have taught me to be ultra careful opening anything suspicious and this is normally my way of going about things.

However, just last week I got infected on a new computer and this time I thought I was immune. I had downloaded and installed Norton AntiVirus and presumed I was safe. Someone had given me a copy of a program to use for a project we are working on (a freeware program I hasten to add!) but had forgotten to give me the serial key needed to activate it. Presumably this had been in a magazine the CD came with and I could not contact him to get a hold of the key, and with time pressing, decided to search the web for it.

I found a key but it was wrapped in a zip file. Yes, I know, only a dumb ass would open it, but I was desperate to get working and in all honesty, thought Norton would detect any nasty should one be there. It didn't and suddenly my computer went haywire. Pop ups appeared all over the place.

I told Norton to scan the computer, but no joy. I then went to Norton's web site and downloaded what was supposed to be a removal tool for this particular virus. The version I had been infected with must have been newer and smarter, for even this specialist tool, after a lengthy and frustrating scan of the computer, came up with zilch.

By now I was panicking. I rebooted in safe mode and found new files in the System 32 directory, which I deleted. This didn't work. The nasty was still hiding somewhere.

I phoned a friend who told me, bluntly, that Norton wasn't all it was cracked up to be and told me to go back to AVG Free (which I used to use). After uninstalling Norton and re-installing AVG, I had a better detection and some more nasties were removed. But still I had a problem with pop-ups every time Internet Explorer was started. Same friend advised I download SpyBot Seek & Destroy.

What a revelation! This free program found so much more than either free AVG or the paid-for Norton programs and also totally killed the nasty that lurked in my computer.

So whilst not going down the road of saying Norton is not the best or SpyBot is, ( they all have their strengths and weaknesses I guess ), I am going to say that for me the best combination is running AVG Free and SpyBot Search & Destroy.

What it does leave me with though are two lessons: one, don't think you are immune no matter how protected you feel your computer is. Never, ever take risky actions! And two, sometimes freeware can be superior than bought programs. Again, there could come a time when I find my current security is not infallible, but whatever happens, I will definitely take no risks or presume nothing bad is happening to the computer.

I would recommend that you at least try these two free products and see if there is anything your current anti-virus software is not detecting. As these are free programs, I am not going to benefit from you downloading them, but at least I can say I have shared something of value with you. If it had not been for my friend's advice, goodness knows what I might have shelled out to eventually get rid of the bug I had - if indeed I ever did.

(Since writing about this elsewhere I have had quite a few people saying the combination of SpyBot and AVG is their preferred set up too, so I feel quite confident about recommending them both.)

http://www.spybot.info/
http://free.grisoft.com/