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| Anti-Virus | AVG | http://free.grisoft.com | Cost: Free for home users | Very easy to use. Probably the best program updater available. Very unintrusive on the system. The free version only allows you to have complete scans of your system every day or to manually invoke system scans. It automatically protects the system and checks email. The paid for version is worth the price (http://grisoft.com). It allows you to schedule when scans take place and how much of the system you want scanned. If you select a paid for version, be careful if the one you select includes a firewall. If it does, do not get ZoneAlarm. You can only have one firewall system on your computer. |
| Firewall | ZoneAlarm | http://zonelabs.com | Cost: Free for home users | Very unintrusive on the system. Excellent updater. It is a bit noisy at first, asking you about almost every program trying to to get in or out of your system. The paid version is a bit quieter, but not by much. Once it learns what should have access to your system, it quiets down. Run the tutorial to learn about its various alerts and how to handle them. To pick it up, you need to select the Home section and look for the free version. They keep asking you to select a paid for version (which is still worth the price), but keep selecting the free version. If you do go for one of the paid versions, most have a built-in anti-virus. Don't install AVG in this case. You can only have one anti-virus system on your computer. |
| Spyware / RootKits | Windows Defender | http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx | Cost: Free | Very unintrusive. Once installed it runs very silently. Make sure you change the scanning schedule so that it runs once a week when the computer is likely to be on. While it is not best at finding many nasty programs, the ones it does handle are not covered by anything else. Even better, it runs in the background making it harder for spyware to install itself. |