The subject of my first column is one of the most important parts of your computer – Virus Protection. I respond to virus infections on average 4 times a week, and viruses can have a horrific effect on home machines and office networks alike. Viruses and malware can enter your computer in a number of ways, normally by email, but also from infected websites and local transfer too across wireless networks or even on data disk or USB memory sticks.
Viruses are small pieces of software which are designed to prevent your computer from working correctly. Some viruses sit in the background and track your web usage or capture passwords you type or credit card numbers and phone numbers, these are called ‘spyware’ viruses. Some viruses try to steer your web browsing towards their advertisers or bring up pop-up adverts and these are known as ‘adware’. Some viruses can hijack your computer and try to make you pay to unlock the desktop or restore operation and these are known as ‘hijacks’, ‘bribeware’, or ‘crimeware’. All of these are collectively known as ‘malware’ and regardless of what these viruses are designed to do, they all take up resources on your computer. Viruses like these can often try to disguise themselves as useful toolbars, performance enhancers or money saving programs, but in the background they are still viruses and have mal intent. If you have any of the following on your PC then I’d recommend removing them ASAP: Rebate informer, INBOX toolbar, MyWebSearch, UniBlue, regtweaker, PCRegScan, FunMoods, or anything that sounds similar.
Antivirus software is essential on all computers, even if they are not often on the Internet. Norton and McAfee are the market leaders in protection and give the best protection against low resource usage, but they are also the most expensive at approximately £35 per machine per year at full retail price or sometimes cheaper during special offers. If your machine is regularly used by teenagers for social media, gaming and file sharing, then heavyweight protection like Norton or McAfee is absolutely essential.
Microsoft and AVG both have good free antivirus products which offer good protection for light or infrequent users. There are many more AV products out there for a few pounds a year upwards, but they don’t offer much more protection than the free AVG or Microsoft products. Some of these providers offer ‘value-added’ software to make them seem good value for money, such as toolbars, PC performance tools or registry scanners, but don’t be fooled, you just need the live virus protection and anything else is just padding. My advice would be: don’t bother with the likes of Sophos, ESET NOD, Kaspersky, Panda, Bullguard, Trend, etc, and stick to the free versions of AVG or Microsoft Security Essentials.
Add-on protection software can give you extra peace-of-mind, and I often use a scanner called Anti-Malware by a company called Malware Bytes (often abbreviated to MBAM.) If you install the free version of this software then it will allow you to run a periodic scan that can find many items of malware that your normal AV software misses.
I use MBAM and some other more violent tools to treat virus infections and I can normally clean a machine fully in around 90 minutes. But there are some viruses that are impossible to remove cleanly and even after removal they can leave your machine in a very poor state or can cause damage that can only be repaired by a system rebuild.
If you suspect that you have a virus infection then don’t delay, get it removed before you lose valuable or personal information, or before it renders your machine unusable. The tell-tale signs of an infection are: unusually poor performance, random pop-up windows, unpredictable or erratic browsing such as web page redirections, hijacked web-searching or home pages, random crashing or rebooting, unmovable advert windows, etc. If you have random behaviour like this from your computer then please call me today to book a visit.
Next time I’ll be talking about my number one computing rule: Backup EVERYTHING!