Why You Never Ever Have to Pay for Antivirus Software

Because it’s free! You can pay out the wazoo for subscriptions to Norton or McAffee, but they bog your system down more than most viruses and do a lot you don’t need. To protect from viruses and spyware I recommend 4 programs for 4 different reasons. McAffee and Norton try to prepackage these 4 types of programs and make a type of…swiss army knife. Well yeah it’s neat and compact but which is better, a fork, or a spork? A screwdriver, or the flat end of a “Sknife”? Multitools usually sacrifice quality for quantity and you don’t want to PAY for that type of service. Here are the programs you need to protect yourself and they’re all free. There are pay versions (linked below) if you prefer to have the nice perks like tech support but the free ones work great!

Free is Better Than Cheap

AVG – This provides what is called real time protection. In other words it monitors what you do on your computer in an effort to prevent virus infection. It does this pretty well.

Ad Aware AE – This provides real time adware protection. Same as AVG only for adware.

Spybot Search and Destroy – This program provides a great immunization feature that protects your web browsers from current threats in the spybot database.

Malwarebyte’s Antimalware – This is an antivirus scanner that has no active protection feature. It has a great scanner that will catch some things AVG might miss in its scan. For the pay version you get active protection.

You don’t need a firewall since Windows XP and up has a built in firewall which is sufficient.

Types of Malicious Software

You might be curious what the different types of malicious programs I just listed were. There are:

Viruses: programs or software designed to either use or abuse your computer. Some viruses are created to make your computer do work for a specific purpose. Get enough computers doing work for you and you have a pretty powerful computer system. As far as abuse goes, it’s like Alfred said in the Dark Knight. “Some people just want to watch the world burn.” These programs are the worst, and they’re annoying. They’ll fiddle with your active processes and make you computer impossible to use sometimes.

Adware: in a word, Weatherbug. Adware is software designed to vomit ads at you in the form of pop ups, flashing ads, what have you. Weatherbug is a good example as it lists in their EULA that they will likely utilize pop ups to advertise to you. It’s basically guerilla advertisement.

Spyware: this is software designed to collect information on a person. This can be any number of things, these are not as harmful as they are annoying. Spyware and Adware fall in the same category in that manner.

The programs above will protect from all of those things pretty thoroughly. The best part of this is they’re all FREE. Nothing’s perfect though and some things do get through from time to time. The best thing to do is to practice safe internetting. These include some fairly simple steps.

Safe Internet Practices

Update Windows regularly. This can be done manually but most people have it set up to work automatically. If it isn’t, go to start, programs, windows updates in order to retrieve updates manually.

Update your antivirus software regularly. AVG Updates automatically by default, however it would be a good idea to manually update Ad Aware and Spybot regularly. You only need to update Antimalware when you’re about to do a scan. This is only necessary if you feel you have some type of infection. I would recommend doing this once or twice a week.

Make sure you’re using the latest version of your web browser. If there’s a new one, get it. I.E. is also more vulnerable than say Firefox or Opera.

DO NOT open emails from someone you do not know. Anyone you don’t know who’s sending you emails is likely soliciting. There’s no point in taking the risk. If someone you don’t know repeatedly emails you, it may be necessary to create a block rule for them. Also, do not open forwards. Chainmail is a breeding ground for viruses. Not to mention those take up too much drive space (or webspace, depending on how you get your mail, either way it fills your inbox up fast).

DO NOT click on any link in a pop up window or an ad that you’re not sure about. If you’re not sure it’s legitimate, it’s not worth it.

DO NOT click automatically when a pop up with a yes/no prompt appears. These can be worded funny. The default idea in a person’s head is to hit “No.” when something like that pops up. Read it. It may say “Do you want to continue without downloading our wonderful software?” In which case clicking “No” just scored you a one way ticket down Viral Valley. Also, if you’ve gotten into an area that is launching that type of pop up, close your browser and start over.

Just be paranoid most of all. Assume when you’re online that everything wants to get you. It’s the same philosophy as driving defensively. We’ve all heard the instructors say it in driving school, “pretend everybody else on the road is out to kill you.”

What to Do When the Unthinkable Happens

First thing off, don’t panic. You’re probably going to get a virus infection once in your life. Everything is going to be OK. You can’t do much of anything to really harm your computer or your data, everything is fixable. There are urban legends about viruses that eat your data and destroy it. While they might corrupt a few files, I’ve never in all my six years of tech experience seen a virus completely wipe out all the vacation pics from Maui.

That being said, virus removal is no shindig. It’s long, annoying, and you better stock up on cheetohs because it takes forever.

What you’ll want to do is cut back on as many system resources in use as possible. To do this, go to start, run, and type in “msconfig” then hit enter. You have to be careful here as you can really muck up your computer if you don’t do what I tell you. Go to the STARTUP tab. Disable everything. Then go to the SERVICES tab, click “Hide all Microsoft Services.” Then click disable all again. This will stop everything non-vital from running on your computer. Then reboot the computer, click OK on the prompt it will give you at reboot, and update all your antivirus software.

From there, go to you’re My Computer icon, right click it, click properties, then go to the System Restore tab. Remove system restore from all drives. This will cut back on places the virus or infection might be, decreasing scan time. After this and the updates are done, reboot, tapping F8 slowly and steadily as your computer is booting.

If you’ve done this right you’ll get a menu that wants to know what mode you want to boot into. Tell it safe mode.

Once booted into safe mode go to c:\documents and settings\ and click Tools in the Explorer window you’re in. Then go to Folder Options and tell it to show hidden files.

Now you should be able to see some extra files. You need to go into your user folder and go into Local Settings and delete all the files in the Temp folder. Then go to c:\documents and settings\*yourusername*\local settings\temporary internet files. This is sometimes not listed despite having hidden folders turned on. Delete all of your temporary internet files. Delete NOTHING ELSE. Repeat this process in all other User files.

Now start up all of your antivirus programs and begin scanning. This can take a while. When it gets done scanning, have it remove whatever infection it finds, then rescan. Repeat this process until all scans come back clean. Then reboot, and scan with all programs again until you get a clean scan. Once you get one, reboot and scan one last time. If you get a clean scan, you’re good to go. If not, you’ve got one that’s recurring. We’ll get to that momentarily. If you’ve got your clean scan after your long and arduous journey, go to msconfig, re-enable all you disabled, then re-enable system restore and create a restore point. The next time this happens you’ll have a clean point of reference to restore to.

If you didn’t get a clean scan you likely only have one or two files that aren’t budging. Or perhaps from the get-go they were unremovable. If they are unremovable, (your antivirus says it can’t remove them for whatever reason) you’ll need to remove your hard drive, plug it into another computer, having saved the file location of the virus/infection from your antivirus notification about said virus, and delete it manually.

If the virus is being removed with each scan but recurs when you reboot, you’ll either need to google your individual virus’s name or simply go with a reformat. If it was me I’d say reformat it but some people hate doing that.

That is the most sure fire way I’ve ever found for removing a viral infection. If it’s not bad you’ll likely end up scanning only a few times. Practice safe internet usage and hopefully you’ll never see the day a virus infects your computer.