Free Anti-Virus for Windows
Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech Talk. Today I want to talk to about a free anti virus software from AVG Technologies. It works both in Windows Vista and Windows XP. So if you’re interested in downloading an antivirus program and you’re not sure of you should get McAfee, or Norton or Kaspersky or any other program that you have to pay for, you can always download this free version from AVG. Go to free.AVG.com to download the free basic edition and to tell you the truth this basic edition is quite packed to features. So it has a few limitations but nothing to really worry about. I mean it’s basic edition only to compare it to the other ones and you can compare it when you go to the website of course. There is no technical support. You can’t call them, you can’t install it on the server and it’s not for commercial use, it’s for private personal use.
Now when you go and download it, it’s about a 50 meg download, so download version 8 right now is 48.34 megabytes and the installation is actually pretty simple and straightforward so you’ll just download the setup.exe file and then run it and then it will start the setup process and we’ll ask a few questions of course. The first ones being really what you want the express installation or the custom, so it’s up to you. Again, I usually like to go through the custom installation and choose the options that I want to install, right so here’s the standard and the custom.
So I’ll choose the custom and go to next and then answer the questions and fill out the information. Like I said this is a free edition so it all comes with the license number already pre-built in the download and after you personalized it you can choose the path where you want to install it of course and go through what it is that you want to install. There has a link scanner and email scanner so you can uncheck those if you don’t want that and just get the standard antivirus and the shield protection for it.
So once you’re done installing it then of course the next thing is to launch it and take a look at the options. It’s running by default in the background of course at all times and you can go ahead and modify things. So first thing that I do of course is run an update, so as soon as you download an antivirus, any antivirus program you wanted to just to the automatic update and make sure that you got the latest antivirus signatures and that everything is the latest version.
Of course, you can register this but again remember there’s no support for it so you can’t really call them up or expect any help from them. Now once installed like I said it’s running in the background, you can see it here, you can right click on the icon for it, it’s on the task bar and open up the interface or update it and go through to the three options there and you could see everything that’s enabled and active and running right now and you scan your entire computer. Of course what you haven’t done with this software yet as you can see here I just installed it two seconds ago, so obviously you can go through the computer scanner and click on scan the whole computer and if you don’t want that you can just san specific folders. Right so it’s got pre-intuitive and straightforward options to choose from or you can go to tools at the top and then access the advanced settings.
From the advanced settings of course you can tweak the way you want this application to work, right whether you want it to run in the background start, start up whether you want certain things to pop up and notify you or not, whether you want to schedule it to automatically run at midnight for example and if it does find the viruses how much of space on your system do you want to allocate to store what it finds so that you can later check the quarantine area and delete those files. So you can honesty reduce the size there and just go through these options slowly right and then see how you want to setup the scanning and the protection of your machine.
So all of these options come enabled here your scanning by default and I recommend obviously that you leave those defaults that make sense to me and I didn’t have any issues with those so it just left those as is. The actual application itself when I checked the memory usage was actually quite low for 40,50 meg program it was actually using about 15 megs of memory at that time, without actually doing a full systems scan. Of course if it’s doing a full system scan and doing more work it’s going to utilize more memory but I believe unlike Norton or McAfee and other programs that are heavy and require more memory this is much like weight so it’s not going to bug down your systems.
So try it out if you’re looking for a free anti virus program and I hope you enjoyed this video and thank you for watching.
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