How I protect my computer


With viruses, trojans, malwares, spywares… abound and hackers on the prowl, the internet is not a safe place. I use the following softwares to fortify my rig.

Antivirus
Avast Home 4.6 (Freeware)

avast! Home antivirus interface

This lightweight yet very effective antivirus — free for home users — is serving me for about a year and I am impressed. It does not hog a lot of system resource, unlike Norton Antivirus the 2006 version of which requires at least 256 MB of RAM. What I like most is its update mechanism. Updates are very frequent and the update files are very small in size… just connect to the net and the update is just a matter of seconds. Ever since I started using Avast I have never had any virus-problem — it simply rocks!avast! Home Avast also blocks trojans trying to intrude into my system. I am considering to buy the professional version of Avast which has extra features like script blocker, command line scanner etc.

Firewall
Zone Alarm Pro (Shareware, US$ 49.95)

Since I remain hooked to the net for a greater part of the day, a firewall is a must. Apart from keeping hackers at bay, Zone Alarm also monitors which programs are accessing the net. Using this for more than 3 years and I am all praise about it. Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus (a combo pack of including Zone Alarm firewall and Zone Alarm antivirus) has bagged the 11th rank in the PCWorld The 100 Best Products of 2005.

Anti-Spyware
Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy. (Freewares)

Both of them feature among the top 10 most popular downloads at Download.com. According to Digit, India’s premier technology magazine, these two programs complement each other very well, that is to say, if Ad-Aware fails to detect a particularly spyware, Spybot catches it and vice versa. Apart from these two, I also use the anti-spyware included in Zone Alarm Pro.


5 responses to “How I protect my computer”

  1. Hi Nippon – Thank you for dropping by at My Dhaba and for being our guest of the day. So glad to know that you liked the contents. It would our pleasure to read your mom’s feedbacks as well. Take good care of you. Cheers!

  2. I prefer to go for paid products.I have Kaspersky as my antivirus and Webroot Spysweeper as my antispyware software.Due to some reason ZA creates a problem after I switched to Dataone.So i am using KAH for now.

    And yes do get a good browser
    http://www.better-browser.com

  3. Hi Pallab,

    I am also using Dataone and ZA simultaneously. It initially gave a prob then I re-installed ZA and no more probs.

    I use FF mainly and sometimes Opera.