Frequently Asked Questions

We are often asked:

Q: What's the best Antivirus software?
A: The short answer, there is'nt one. The long answer, there are a range of reputable antivirus software vendors. At the end of the day, pick a product that suits your needs and keep it up to date. If you’re a small business, don’t buy a product with a built in firewall, it will only cause you grief when you share documents and printers amongst your co-workers. If you want an unbiased review, check out www.av-comparatives.org. They provide an unbiased, independent review of the top AV products. The overall best product for 2010 is F-Secure. Next are Avira, eScan, ESET, G DATA and if you’re looking for a good, free product, Microsoft Security Essentials will fill your needs.

Direct Link to the 2010 Summary Report
http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/summary/summary2010.pdf

Q: How can I not get a virus, or why do I keep getting them?
A: If your using the Internet, browsing, emailing or just plain sharing files, sooner or later, you will get a virus. The most common variants at the moment are the fake scammer variants. These typically pop up a browser box, which looks like a virus scanner. It seems to scan your computer and find many, many virus. It next displays a popup box that asks if you would like to remove them. The box normally has two options, Yes or No/Cancel. No matter which button you press, the next thing that happens is a file is downloaded to your computer, or at least it attempts to download a file. The file is encrypted and no AV software will find anything wrong with it. Once the file executes, its first action is to disable whatever AV software you have and embed itself deep in the operating system, making it all but impossible for AV software to remove it.

Now that you know how you get one, well the most common way at the moment. Follow these rules.

If you get a popup box or a window that says you have 10, 20, 100, 200 virus, malicous, porn files, whatever. Its a fake.
If you get a popup box that says you have one or two, and its a message from your AV software, believe it. Delete the files. Dont click, allow.
Avoid P2P (peer to peer) networks, more often than not, the files shared on these networks are riddled with virus and trojans.
Banner ads on websites and you dont even have to click on the advert. You will get a popup/fake window. Exit out with the X or hold down ALT and press F4 until everything closes down.
Don't go back to the site.

Q: How can I remove a virus that my AV software cant?

Sometimes a simple system restore will put your computer back and let you resume operations. If this works, immediately make sure your AV software is up to date and WORKING. Often the virus will cripple or disable the AV software and while it will appear to be working, it is in fact doing nothing. Do a full and thorough scan of EVERY file on the computer, with a second scan. A good free offline (not realtime) scanner is Malwarebytes and the paid version is worth every penny and best of all, its a one time fee. (at time of writing)
Download MalwareBytes, update it and set it to scan every file (full scan).

If the system restore does'nt work, dont play with it, get a professional to repair it. You'll only make things worse and you can even get to the point where there's no option but to reinstall the operating system and everything on it.

Q: Should I use more than one AV?

Most anti-virus programs operate in two modes:

•Scan: the utility examines memory and files on disk for traces of malware. This involves actually examining the contents each file for things that "look like" viruses.

•Monitor: often referred to as "real time" monitor, the anti virus program is continually running and scans files as they are downloaded to your machine, notifying you nearly immediately if the file you just received contains something that looks like a virus.

There's nothing wrong with periodically running an anti-virus scan with more than one anti-virus program. The key here is that it's just a scan - it starts, it scans, and then it's done. There's no opportunity to come in to conflict with another anti-virus program.

Real time monitoring, is another story. When you install most anti-virus programs they often automatically install and enable their real-time monitors. Running two or more real-time anti-virus monitors at the same time is very likely to cause a conflict. That conflict could result in error messages, crashes of the anti-virus programs, or other types of failure.

So it's certainly OK to have more than one anti-virus program installed, and it can make sense to run a scan using a different program from time to time, but you must make sure you only have one real-time monitor enabled at a time.

"Running two or more real-time anti-virus monitors at the same time is very likely to cause a conflict."The simplest way to do so, as I mentioned earlier, is to rely on a single, good anti-virus program and make sure that its database of known viruses is continually being updated."

Related resources

Note - mention of a product name does not constitute a recommendation