Using your computer without an antivirus application is like driving a care on the freeway without seatbelts, doors or windows. An antivirus program is designed to keep your computer free of virus infection by providing real time protection from viruses and virus activity. An antivirus application will scan your computer on a regular basis and based upon its database of virus definitions, it will identify and handle the virus in three different ways. The virus application will first try and fix the infection by cleaning (some applications refer to this as “healing”) the infected file of the virus. If the application cannot clean the infection it will quarantine the virus. By quarantining the virus the file with the infection will not be accessed by your computer. Therefore it cannot infect other files on your hard drive. If neither of these two fixes can be performed the antivirus application last resort is to delete the file. In some cases the antivirus application cannot perform any of the fixes. This may be the case if the antivirus definitions are out of date or the virus is very new and unknown but I have seen this only on a rare occasion.

Bottom Line – your antivirus application is only as good as it most recent update. There are many to choose from. The most popular being Norton and MacAfee. These two have been in a neck and neck battle for the top spot of virus killers for years. What ever you choose you need to make sure that the program offers:

1. Starts when your computer starts.
2. Full time protection.
3. Scans incoming and outgoing email as well as Internet downloads.
4. Provides automatic updates at a regular interval.
5. Automatic scheduling of full system scans.