One of the most important step of in maintaining a computer is to keep it free of viruses. The least damage by virus could be invisible such as stealing and mass mailing your email contacts. But the worse scenario could be where the virus completely corrupt the system files, requiring complete re-installation of the computer operating system and software.

As we all should know, prevention is better than cure. And this law applies to computer viruses as well. So installing an anti-virus software on your computer will be the first line of defense. There are actually quite a number of free (mostly for home or non-commercial users) anti-virus software available from the World Wide Web. Just to state a few, there is ClamWin, Avast!, BitDefender and AVG.

ClamWin is a free open-source antivirus released under the GNU General Public License.
At the time of writing, ClamWin had not implemented on-access scanner. In other words, files being read or written will not be automatically scanned.

But even with an anti-virus software installed and running, some complex viruses are able ‘neutralize’ these anti-virus software through various ways. So whether you have an anti-virus software installed or not, it is still advisible to run some online scans every week or so. And here’s my list of online anti-virus scanners (do take note that most of these scanners requires Microsoft Internet Explorer to run):

To scan a single file, use VirusTotal, a free online virus and malware scanners that uses several antivirus engines to scan the file.

Related posts:

• Windows Live SkyDrive
• Accessing Malaysia-Today from within Malaysia
• Improved Version of Vista Mail Tray

- Written on Saturday, June 7, 2008 3:18 - 0 Comments -