Anti-virus Software

Internet security applications – a necessary evil?

I originally started off using ZoneAlarm, which worked really well for me until more and more updates were applied.  On a couple of occasions the updates blocked Internet access, which was particularly annoying, because I then lost my point of reference to help me resolve the issue.  After a series of mishaps with ZoneAlarm I reluctantly decided to look for a “better” product, which was cheap or free but still provided me with effective protection against malware, viruses and others nasty things.  Surely these features should be part of the operating system you use? – but in the early days of OS development I assume Microsoft hadn’t foreseen the growing depth of anti-Microsoft feelings about their plans to monopolise desktop operating systems, databases, development environments, the web, data centres and networking etc..

So having discounted a highly reputable ZoneAlarm, where do you start?  I looked at BitDefender, Kaspersky, CA and Avast!, who all have a range of products to provide complete PC security.  The problem I found was some of these slowed my system down.  Hence the trade off for complete security was a degradation in the performance of my system.  OK, this can be resolved by upgrading your system hardware, or can it?  I found this again a tricky decision, because hardware components change so quickly.  I couldn’t really upgrade the processor, because the remaining socket 478’s weren’t that much more powerful than I had.  Upgrading the RAM also turned out to be a ‘No’, because my RAM was RAMBUS, which is still as expensive now as it was when I first built the system.  So I built a new Computer.

Learning from my experiences to date, I plugged in a router/firewall to set up a home office LAN sharing Internet connectivity, hence I didn’t need a software Firewall.  I installed Vista Business (Yes, I’m one of the few) and was actually reasonably impressed with the added security provided by Windows Defender as standard in the operating system.  There are some frustrations with Vista, but overall it works a little better than XP Pro, although my new PC is a significantly higher specification than my previous one.  So at this point I appeared to have everything in place except anti-virus.  The last piece of software I tried was Avast, which seemed to provide the levels of protection I was looking for without eating into system resources.

This is a complex subject and one which should be given due consideration.  You need to weigh up the trade-off between performance and security and understand the steps you can take to partition the stages of security to lessen the impact on your system’s performance.  Whilst this article is targeted at the small office or home user, the products mentioned above all scale up for larger business use.  Most of the previously mentioned software suppliers offer free trials of their software for you to decide which you prefer.