James Oliver’s PC Guide & Tips

In my computer consulting business, I’ve had the opportunity to see many anti-virus products. I’ve seen free ones. I’ve seen paid ones. I’ve seen some that the customer thought was free, bit it wasn’t

For many years, I was a Norton Anti-Virus fan. It was used at every corporate office I worked at. I assumed that they were the top, and at the time, I believe they were. However, now, they’re simply a long time brand name that can produce a crappy product and set it out on the market and people will still buy it because it’s Norton. Don’t ever assume because something has a big name that it’s the best. Do your research!

For a couple years, I tried several anti-viruses before I found one I could settle on. I tried NOD32 and it was awesome! I could scan clients systems in less than 20 minutes. Found out that was because it over looked a lot. I switched to Dr. Web. It was slow and missed things. I tried Trend Micro. I tried a couple FREE anti-virus products.

So now, I believe the best anti-virus is Kaspersky products. This won’t be the only blog you read this one. This won’t be the only place you’ll find this information. Kaspersky is consistently rated #1 in comparison charts.

More information on the best anti-virus, Kaspersky, can be found by clicking right HERE.

Here’s also another one of my opinions.. If you simply can’t afford to purchase an anti-virus, a free AV is better than no AV (but just barely).  With all the risks on the Internet, why take chances?

Hope you enjoyed this post.

Many of us don’t even think about the security of data that we store on our flash drives. They’ve become cheap enough that if we lose it, we just replace them. At least I do.

However, what happens when you put sensitive data on your flash drive and it falls out or your pocket, you leave it in a public computer on accident, you leave it in a friends computer.

I’d like to mention a free method of encrypting the data on your flash drive so that it’s rendered useless to others. Check out TrueCrypt for an encryption process for your flash drives. Not only does it encrypt your flash drives, but you can encrypt your operating system drive as well. You can also encrypt individual files.

They have a section on their website that gives you a beginners tutorial.

Hope you find this helpful.