Every year a large number of viruses, Trojans , worms and malwares are created to harm the or disable the functioning of the PCs. These are made with intentions to have unauthorized access to important files and programmes and to corrupt the system and the useful informations stored in this. An unprotected PC is vulnerable to the attacks of virus, worms, malwares , etc. and the PC user cannot even understand that his/ her system have been affected by the malwares unless the system crashes. An antivirus software is thus required to keep the malwares at bay from affecting the computers. A virus typically wipes out the master boot record of a system and thus no files can be opened or used. The system has to be formatted to make it usable again.
Antivirus softwares provides protection to the PC from the harmful invaders. A software is judged to be good or bad depending on its ability to detect viruses and spywares and its user friendliness. The best antivirus should have the capability to detect and destroy all types virus softwares. Every day a number of viruses are designed , thus to combat the upgraded viruses , the antivirus softwares are also to be upgraded regularly to detect new types of viorus programmes. Again user friendliness is a very important feature, if a user does not understands the nitty gritties of an antivirus software , it is of least use.
Some of the important features of an antivirus are:
i)Scanning capability: This includes the capability of on-access scanning, on-demand scanning, heuristic scanning, manual scanning and adware/spyware scanning, script blocking, etc.
ii) Other capabilities includes scanning of compressed files, auto cleaning of infected files, provision of email protection, protection of registry start up, etc
iii)Updates: How fast the and automatically the antivirus gets updated to the system
iv)The technical support it provides including tutorials to help the user etc.
v) The number of configurations the particular antivirus can support.
Depending on these criteria some of the best antivirus softwares are:
Kaspersky Antivirus, Norton Antivirus, AVG Antivirus, Avast Antivirus, Webroot, Panda Antivirus, Avira, Bit defender , etc .