Undoubtedly the most commonly asked question you will get next to ‘who is the best ISP’ is going to be ‘which anti-virus offers the best protection?’ Answering the latter with any certainty can be a little sketchy at best. See, the problem for most people is navigating through the entire hype and marketing gunk to get to the meat of the matter - who’s truly the best in the biz.

Benchmarks, lab tests, and other research related headaches.

One of the most common ways for us to recommend which antivirus program is going to be the most superior is to go to one of the big ’software review sites’. While I feel confident that their results are not incorrect or corrupted by some corporate payoff, they still tend to vary from source to source. My best method for dealing with this is to pick 10 completely unrelated review sites and look for the trends. Which two always seem to come out on top? If you can generate numbers like 7 out or 10 or even 8 out of ten from your research, then you are on the right track. For example, let’s say that in the free category Avast comes out on top and in the paid category, PC Cillin is a winner. Now what? Should either of these be enough? Is the free one less worthwhile than the paid program? It depends how you look at it.

Non-free is not always better.

One thing that I have noticed over the years is that all antiviruses have a weakness in virus detection. More often than not, free antiviruses do an excellent job, however they might lack some of the features that a paid version of another antivirus might offer. For instance Avast offers their program free for home use. While it is a truly innovative program offering such amazing features as P2P scanning, it is most certainly not bullet proof. Each program seems to have the ability to detect or miss a virus. Since each program has its own method for detection and utilization of its own database, this is really not that big a shock.

When in doubt, double up.

Since each antivirus seems to be a hit and miss sort of thing, I like to make sure that my clients do their antivirus scans weekly with the program that they have installed on their machines, and then follow up every month with an online antivirus from either Panda or Trend Micro. This simply provides that extra sense of certainty that comes with knowing that your PC is definitely virus free.