If you are looking for a good free antivirus/antimalware product for your personally owned computer, Avast is an excellent choice. Avast now offer Avast Business free which is a centrally managed tool and is useful for organisations – this is part of IAM’s standard operating environment and is used on all IAM owned computers.
Many people like to pay money for an antivirus product and McAfee is a common choice, however in our experience, the internet connections in Afghanistan are not reliable enough for McAfee antivirus and regularly cause it to stop working after an update. Once it gets into this non-working state, McAfee do provide an online repair tool, but our internet connections are again generally not good enough for it to successfully repair the product. And even if they do repair it, it generally goes bad again within a few minutes or a few days.
Avast on the other hand has demonstrated itself to be reliable. So if you want to spend money on antivirus you can buy the Avast paid version. Otherwise you can use Avast free, which is a fully featured product in itself. The link at the top of this article will take you to a comparison page where you can see the 3 different versions they offer and download one to install on your computer.
If you are using Avast there is one thing you may want to do – customise some of the settings. By default it talks to you (yes, I mean spoken english) when it updates its virus settings. This can be annoying (although funny at first, especially if you enable the pirate voice). To change settings such as this, and to remove some of the advertising notices follow this guide.
WARNING: You should only ever have one real time antivirus scanner installed on your computer at any time! If you install more than one it will slow your computer down unnecessarily, therefore after downloading this one, remove any other antivirus tool you have before installing this one.