Hello everyone,

Today I want to talk about protecting your computer from viruses and malware. There are many programs out there that will help protect your computer from malicious viruses and software but I have a few that I use regularly and recommend to everyone.

The first one I want to talk about is AVG Free Anit-Virus. Like it says, this program is totally free to individual users and it’s a good strong program for protecting your computer. It also has many other options, like protecting you when you surf the internet and preventing malware from accessing your computer.

The installation for this program is very easy and straight forward, just make sure you select the free option and not the 30 day trial of the paid version when you’re installing AVG. You should also run the update and the optimization scan while installing so AVG will run at peek performance on your computer.

The next program I’d like to tell you about is avast Free Antivirus. Again, another free program that works really well at protecting your computer. This one, I believe, is a little more defensive against malware but both AVG and avast are pretty well equal in my eyes.

The installation for avast is easy also but it works just a little different. When you get to the end of the installation, you’ll be asked if you’d like to run a boot time scan. It is a good idea to go ahead and run this scan during the install. The difference here is avast will reboot your system to start the scan. While this scan is running it will appear that you’ve reached the blue screen of death (BSOD), and then it will appear as Windows is running a disk scan. Don’t be alarmed, this is avast running the boot time scan on your system. It’s actually a more effective method to be able to scan files before they are actually being used by your computer since any file that’s infected isn’t being controlled by the virus itself.

One more program I’ll tell you about here today is Malwarebytes. This program is a thoroughly effective program for finding and removing malware on your computer. Malware can be just as intrusive and invasive as viruses and it will slow your computer down excessively.

This program doesn’t run constantly in the background like virus programs do, but if you add this to your computer and run the scan regularly it will be very effective at helping your virus program protect your computer. The install is as easy as any other program and when it’s complete you have the option to update it and run a full scan. I recommend you go ahead and do all this while you’re installing it anyway.

And the last program is CCleaner. CCleaner is also a free program that is used for computer optimization. It does several things to clean up and protect your privacy, but the tool I want to tell you about here is the registry cleaner. Through time, after installing and deleting programs and regular use, your registry can get very cluttered. The registry is the base for Windows to run properly. If it’s cluttered or infected it will destroy your computers performance, and could eventually fail causing your computer to fail completely.

After you install this program, you’ll want to run the registry cleaner tool. I will advise you that this can be very dangerous to your system if something gets removed that shouldn’t be. CCleaner will back up your registry for you so you can go back to the previous version if the clean up doesn’t work. So while using this program, please be careful and make sure you’re not destroying your computer worse. Don’t let this scare you from using it though, it is a good program and generally won’t fail you.

So to sum up, add some of these programs to your system to help prevent future issues and even speed up your computers performance.