The great thing about anti-virus software is that it runs in the background and with minimal impact on your day-to-day activities or your PC’s performance.
And, in some ways, that could be a bit of a drawback. It’s not a problem 99 percent of the time but occasionally, you need to keep an eye on what your AV software is doing — especially so if you don’t know what where the software came from.
Search for anti-virus using a famous web search engine, and you’ll get thousands of hits. Among the top hits is, of course, Avast but, as you trawl down the list, you’ll start finding lots of names you don’t recognise.
Some of them will promise all sorts of benefits — and the more extravagant the claims, the more it can pay to look carefully before installing. Just as you wouldn’t (I hope) just give your money without extensive research to the first person who asks you to invest with them, so it is with AV software.
How to choose then? You could check whether the software has been reviewed recently, for example. In a recent PC Magazine review, Avast got a good write-up, the author — who’s an experienced technology journalist — finding that Avast does as well as the better-known paid-for products and that “Avast! in particular tested well for malware removal”.
But some so-called AV software is, in fact, a front for malware. Once installed, it can then perform all sorts of nasty tricks, for example, trawling though your address book, mining it for contacts and sending out spam with poisoned links, or logging your keystrokes for anything that looks like a credit card number and sending the information on to identity thieves.
The standard rules for being safe on the Internet apply when choosing an AV package: check the vendor is an established player in the AV market, and look for reviews and for the experiences of other users.
Is it time to upgrade to Windows 7?
You may feel that Windows XP is good enough for what you need to do. You may feel that you don’t want to pay Microsoft any more money. You may even feel that Windows 7 is a downgrade compared to XP. But there’s more to it than that.
Windows XP is Microsoft’s most successful operating system having lasted from its launch in 2001 to 2010. Nine years is a lifetime and a half time in PC years but XP is now starting to look long in the tooth. Not only does it not support many of the newer types of hardware being released, more importantly, it’s not as secure as Windows 7.
From a security perspective, there’s a lot more in 7 than meets the eye, including the ability to take advantage of Intel’s latest on-chip security features under its trusted execution technology branding. And if you’re on XP service pack 2, you need to be aware that Microsoft ended support for it very recently, so you won’t be getting any more updates or patches, leaving you vulnerable to the latest generation of malware.
This process will continue, and eventually, no version of XP will receive updates. That day has yet to arrive but arrive it will, so it’s worth starting to think about what to do when it does.
