Tech Impressions: Great Security Programs

I know that most people do not want to spend a whole bunch of money just to protect their PC’s. What some don’t know is that you can get good protections programs for free. I have chosen some of my top favorites to talk about and to suggest.

Anti-Virus & Firewall: Yes I know I said free but I do highly recommend this program, it is worth the money. For my anti-virus and firewall I use ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite. It has some of the best protection for a good price which happens to be $50 for protection of 3 PC’s (Just look at ads in the newspaper such as Fry’s Electronics, I bought mine for $20 after rebates and all of that). With it you get a 2-Way Firewall, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, ID Theft Protection and more.

Interested? Visit: http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/zonealarm-computer-security-suite.htm

Anti-Malware and Cleanup: Ad-Aware is a great program, and it has its free version also which I use. It is great at detecting things that sometimes ZoneAlarm does not. It helps fine Malware and rootkits. When it finds something, it does its best to remove and clean it. When scanning it also does a great job on picking up tracking cookies and removing them by cleaning it means it removes ALL traces of the infection. I again highly recommend getting this program.

Interested? Visit: http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

NOTE: Ad-Aware (above) and Spybot Search & Destory (below) do conflict a little bit. This has been taken from the Safer-Networking website: “If you have the AdAware option to scan inside archives enabled, AdAware may find files in the Spybot-S&D folder. Spybot-S&D does not contain any spyware, but it creates backups of everything you fix (until you remove those backups from the Recovery list), and AdAware complains about these backups. You can safely ignore these backups found by AdAware.”

Anti-Spyware: Spybot Search & Destory is amazing at picking up spyware that the other programs did not find. It picks up almost everything. When scanning it does not take up a lot of processing power so you can go about and do other things while it runs in the background. When it cleans something, it makes a backup of that file. Overall I do think the program needs a little more to it, but its good at what it does just now.

Interested? Visit: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

Hard Drive Clean up: Last but not least CCleaner is what I use to throw out old temporary internet files, downloads, cookies, history, etc.. Not only does it do that but it has options to clear out logs and things set by Windows that you may not know about. It lets you analyze all that it will clean before you jump right into cleaning, just so you know all your files are safe. I highly recommend that you run this at least once a month.

Interested? Visit: http://www.ccleaner.com/