How to Choose an Anti-Virus Program

Virus infections are the bane of many computer users. More and more viruses are really nasty and difficult to remove without re-formatting the hard drive and re-installing Windows from scratch. Given the increasing difficulty of removing infections, virus protection is vital. Yet, determining which anti-virus program provides the best protection is not easy. How does one decide? The most popular, recognizable or expensive products are not necessarily the best. Brand leadership can often be attributed to more effective marketing, not better performance.

The selection should be based upon detection rates, as published by independent test organizations (not computer sites or magazines whose independence is prejudiced by anti-virus vendor advertising). The test organizations in which I have confidence, are AV-Comparatives, Anti-Malware Test Lab, Virus Bulletin and AV-Test.org. Besides looking at the most current test results, look at the history of different products to get a sense of which can be depended upon over time, rather than just which has the highest scores in the latest tests. The test reports tend to be very complex and not at all easy to read and interpret.

Most anti-virus programs depend upon virus definitions which need to be updated promptly and frequently to catch the latest malware (viruses, trojans, worms). Because the internet enables the distribution of information around the world at the speed of light, a just-released (aka zero-day) virus can be a threat to every computer on earth in mere seconds -- before virus definitions can be updated and diseminated. Further, viruses have evolved in complexity and capabilities and, just like their real-life counterparts, can mutate into forms that go undetected by existing definitions of earlier variants. Such "polymorphic" viruses are very difficult to detect. To do so, the best anti-virus programs examine the behaviour and characteristics of files, programs and network traffic and make a judgment call on whether they are benign or viral. In this way -- through the use of heuristics -- even zero-day and polymorphic viruses can be detected and dealt with.

Further complicating the selection process, are ease-of-use, system resource requirements, and compatibility considerations. The best anti-virus program isn't of much use if it consumes so much of the computer's resources that the computer slows to a crawl. Some of the best are too complex for many users to install, set up and use. Test results also don't tell the whole story, either. Some of the programs with excellent detection scores cause so much grief in a real-life environment that uninstalling them often solves conflicts and issues and restores the computer to life. Even then, some of them require running a post-uninstall clean-up tool to remove residual files and registry entries that continue to plague the system, like a Zombie.

Based on the above and my experience, I recommend Avira's AntiVir anti-virus as the best choice for most users. It has frequent and prompt definition updates and an outstanding heuristic engine, which yield excellent detection rates. It is very light on system resources, doesn't conflict with other programs, is user-friendly and is very reasonably priced. Those are also reasons why we are now an official reseller of AntiVir.

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