Southern York County Life

Anyone who is looking for a free antivirus product that is as good as or better that the commerical products should check out:

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1

The product is free for home users and has a small footprint and is very effective.
They have also donated several copies to Non-profits and Churchs that I have worked with.

As part of my job, I test and recommend software for Enterprise Customers.

Craig Brown

I agree with Craig that the Free virus tool AVG v7.0 that is from Grisoft is a great product. It also has the ability to scan incoming and outgoing e-mail message attachements.

I should note however that many of the commercial products are now including additional features that we feel are just as important to have.

These features include:
- scanning IM (Instant Messaging) programs
- built-in firewall (most are better than Windows XP’s version that is now provided in Service Pack 2)
- spam filtering, thought MS Outlook 2003 provideds an updated filtering tool every two months are works quite well compared to the commercial/add-on programs for spam filtering
- spyware/adware/malware scanning, detection/removal and prevention.

Note: Most of the commerical anit-virus programs that now include spyware/adware/malware detection and removal are mediocre at best. While it is a nice feature you cannot rely solely on their product for spyware/adware/malware protection.

I’ll follow up with some links to both free and commercial products that will help keep your machine free of viruses, spyware/adware and malware.

Jeff Bruening
Systems & More Corp.

Please see the topic “Spyware / Adware / Malware” for a list of free tools and paid programs that we recommend to help the fight against spyware and adware.