3 Reasons to Choose a Free Antivirus Solution

They’re a must today for anyone who spends any amount of time on the Internet – with all the malicious viruses, worms and Trojans floating about on the web and looking to sabotage and destroy your computer and your data, if you don’t have a decent security package installed on your system, you’re going to end up suffering both hardware and software losses. As with any kind of software, you have both free versions and paid options with security and antivirus solutions. And contrary to popular belief, just because a software tool is free, it does not mean that it is of poor quality. You only have to take a look at the Linux operating system to know that “free” is sometimes better than expensive alternatives that must be renewed time and again. So here goes, a few reasons why free antivirus solutions are better than their pay-and-use counterparts:

1. 
   You don’t have to shell out money: When something is free and can be downloaded off the Internet, all you have to spend is the effort to go to the site and install it on your computer. You don’t have to spend $100 or more on a package that you can get at no cost at all. Besides, there are no recurring costs incurred in renewing your subscription every year, once your current package expires. There are no pesky reminders to renew in so many days, and you are free to do your work with nothing to renew.
2. If anything is unsatisfactory, there’s no loss: If something goes wrong with your antivirus solution and you’re not satisfied, there’s no loss with a free solution. All you need to do is uninstall the one you’ve got and install a new free one. Besides, some companies offer you 30-day trial versions, so you could try out one for a month and then switch over to a new one before you decide to upgrade or go for a paid version that has more features and options.
3. Most paid security solutions are bulky and a nuisance: When I bought my notebook, it came with a year’s subscription of Norton. I decided to switch over to AVG once the year was up, and to my horror, found that I could not open Firefox or any other browser to surf the net. IE would work, and that too, sporadically. I finally had to reinstall Norton and renew my subscription at a hefty price – and even though I railed mentally against the anti-competitive tactics of Norton, I was left with no alternative. Most large security suites take up a large portion of your memory and cannot be easily removed – a few residual files remain even if you uninstall the package, causing havoc in some way or the other.

And if you’re still not satisfied with the above reasons, check out the PCMag story that rated three free antivirus software solutions and gave them top marks and the other story in The Register that tells of major paid security solutions failing the Virus Bulletin VB100 certification standard for further proof that free antivirus solutions are just as good for standard operations on your PC, if not better than most of the paid versions out there.

Author Information : This guest post is contributed by Barbara Williams, she writes on the topic of Computer Technician Programs.