Fact: Viruses are now written by professional programmers in order to steal your money.  This is one of today's organized crime favorites...

Which antivirus should you buy?   Which one works the best?
Norton, McAfee, Kapersky, oh my...

You might be surpised to know this:

APCS has served the computer support needs of New England businesses for over 20 years.  We take pride in the fact that none of our clients have ever experienced any outage or serious impediment to their operations because of computer viruses or spyware. Our relentless testing of antivirus, antispyware and firewall products seems to be working.

In past years we have recommended Norton Antivirus as our preferred antivirus software.  However, in the last few years we have had many problems at our customer sites doing upgrades and renewals of Norton Antivirus. We have also noticed system performance degradation with Norton Antivirus. Norton seems to put a very large load on PCs causing them to run more slowly. Attempts to contact Tech Support for the product have also been very frustrating.

As a result, our testing steered us to a different antivirus product that gets higher scores in all these areas.  We now recommend and install AVG Antivirus products for our customers. And we now use AVG on all the "production" PCs in our own shop.

AVG Antivirus has been an up and coming virus scanner for many years. Its free version is one of the most downloaded files on the Internet. The new AVG interface is clean and intuitive while still remaining useful.

AVG went through a rewrite of their virus scanning engine and included two of their stand alone products with AVG Antivirus as well. AVG Antispyware and AVG Antirootkit were both integrated with the virus scanner. Also revamped was the way AVG Antivirus uses the hardware within your computer. It was changed to make better use of the multiple cores which are common in today's computers. This should speed up scanning as well as reduce day-to-day slowdowns.

AVG AntiVirus is one of the Top Ten AntiVirus products...

A vast number of people download the free and paid versions of AVG every week. Based on VACM's testing, AVG is one of the best Antivirus products available right now if you want minimum impact on system performance and maximum virus detection and removal.  Our tests indicated that Norton slowed down our systems significantly more than AVG Antivirus did.  And Norton did not remove a number of threats that AVG detected and removed. 
 
We cannot stress enough how important Antivirus software is for your PC(s). Everyone who surfs the web or uses email needs these 3 things to protect themselves from the constant threat of malware.

These 3 essential softwares help avoid Identity Theft and keep your PC(s) out of the repair shop.  You need all three of these PC "Guards" for the most complete protection.

The following links go to pages where you can download Free and Paid versions of these top PC protection products.  You will choose which versions to download based on your own preferences (free or paid).  Typically, the free versions have the core functionality you want, but the extra features and the automation features are disabled. In other words, the free versions do the same thing as the paid versions, but you must be vigilant in remembering to actually do the software updates and scans and removals of malware because that does not get done automatically in the free versions. 

Do you want to run these tools manually on a schedule that you maintain and adhere to or do you want these protections to just run automatically in the background without any human interverntion on your part?

• get our top rated AntiSpyWare tool
• get our top rated AntiVirus tool
• get our most reliable Personal Firewall