title: Free antivirus and anti-spyware for Windows link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/free-antivirus-and-anti-spyware-for-windows/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 506 created: 2008/06/11 14:45:26 created_gmt: 2008/06/11 14:45:26 comment_status: open post_name: free-antivirus-and-anti-spyware-for-windows status: publish post_type: post

Free antivirus and anti-spyware for Windows

There are lots of antivirus and anti-spyware products out there for Windows. All of them are very good. Most are reasonably priced, given their high quality. It’s a good thing too, because Windows is a veritable honey-pot for viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, adware and malware of all kinds. For anyone who needs to run Windows anywhere in their environment, good antivirus and anti-spyware programs are essential tools — both for maintaining system security and performance.

Among the free offerings there are two that stand apart for me. ClamWin and Spybot Search & Destroy.

ClamWin is the Windows version of the popular clamav antivirus scanner for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It is maintained by a dedicated group of programmers and updated regularly to account for new threats. It’s being open source ensures that vulnerabilities are found and resolved quickly by the literally thousands of developers who are looking over the core team’s shoulder. The free version for Windows is every bit as good as what’s available on the Unix side, installs easily and runs as a Windows service so it can be effective on machines run by low information users.

Spybot Search & Destroy is a product I only recently tried myself. While it is not open source, it is free, and maintained by a team of devoted volunteers led by Patrick Kolla under the umbrella of Safer Networking Limited. In the short time I’ve been running it it’s proved to be an amazingly effective, well-engineered and unintrusive product. While any anti-spyware product is going to be hard on performance when doing a full disk scan, the nice thing about Spybot is that the time it takes to do a scan is significantly less than other products.

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