Virus Protection

I'm sure just about everybody who has a Windows PC know by now that they need to have some sort of anti-virus software running. The McAfee suite seems to be quite popular, but being a New England Yankee, I like free stuff when I think it works well.

For some years I used, and recommended, the free edition of AVG Anti-Virus. It works well, it updates automatically, it's easy to set it up to scan when you want it to, and for the most part it stays out of your way. But every once in a while the automatic update seems to get 'stuck', and you need to manually trigger and update.

So lately I have been recommending to my clients that they use Microsoft Security Essentials instead. MSE has a very simple interface, you can configure it to update and scan nightly or whenever you want, and the automatic updates seem to work flawlessly. MSE is free from Microsoft, as long as you have a genuine Windows installation.

I recently did a clean-up and optimization call on a client with an older PC with minimal memory. As part of that service call I installed and configured Microsoft Security Essentials on that PC. The boot process on that PC seemed to take forever.

Since then, I've done a bit of experimenting on one of my PCs at home, and it seems that MSE uses more resources on the computer than AVG does. That probably makes little difference on a modern PC with a fast processor and plenty of memory, but for older PCs, I am going back to recommending AVG Free Anti-virus over MSE, even though it requires a bit of hands-on maintenance every now and then.

And Jim, if you happen to read this, I would have emailed you to let you know about this, but I never got your email address.

Allen "Monkeywrench" Freeman