There are alot of free utilities out there for keeping your computer safe- some are good, others are not.  Here’s a short list of programs I’m familiar with:

Anti-Virus

• ClamWin – http://www.clamwin.com/
• AVG Free (free for personal use) – http://free.avg.com/
• Norton Security Scan - http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/WelcomePage.asp

Anti-Spyware

• Windows Defender – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx
• Spybot Search & Destroy – http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
• Ad-Aware – http://www.lavasoft.com/

Other Options

I personally like a program called CCleaner (the leading ‘C’ is for crap) – it removes extraneous temporary files, downloads, things of that nature.

• CCleaner – http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

Another interesting option is the Google Pack – you can select which programs you want to download, install them, and they will be automatically updated in the future, which is rather important for anti-virus and anti-spyware software.  The Google Pack can contain whatever programs you want, but the relevant ones to security are Spyware Doctor and Norton Security Scan

• Google Pack – http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html?utm_source=en-et-gblog_security&utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=en

What security do you use on your computers?  Does it work the way you expect?

Tags: bigsig

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