Free Antivirus Programs
John was excited. The day had finally arrived when he could take delivery of his new PC. Everything had been carefully planned in advance. He had done his research online and found a machine that would be able to fly through the latest 'shoot-em-up' computer games and also be great to help in his business work at home. He had even gone out and bought in advance the latest computer 'Internet Security Suite' from PC World. He didn't want to trust free antivirus programs on his new little baby.
When the delivery guy finally rang the doorbell, John was up like a shot. Yeah, those boxes were bigger than he expected, but no problems. In a half hour he had it all put together and he was ready to give it an initial run through. Wow! This thing's fast. There's nothing like a new, fast, powerful PC to get your heart going. He may have been 32, and a Marketing Systems manager, but he felt just like a kid at Christmas.
After messing about playing some games and surfing the Net, he remembered that he better install that 'Internet Security Suite' program. Reading through the software box, John confirmed that it gave protection against computer viruses, worms, spyware, trojans and even had a personal firewall. Great, he thought. Total protection, and total peace of mind.
But that was end of the 'Christmas Day feeling'. Shortly after installing the program he noticed that his machine was no longer running like a finely tuned athlete. It was going painfully slow, more like running through treacle. In fact he wondered if he actually had a computer virus on his PC.
After a couple of wasted hours trying to get things to work, he decided to take a look at some online forums to find the cause of the problem. There he found it hard to believe what he was reading. Loads of others had the same problem because the 'Internet Security Suite' hogs system resources so that every other function that you try to run will be executed very slowly. Even more surprising was the solution that many of these experts were suggesting "use one of the good quality free antivirus programs that is light on system resources". Oh well, back to square one John thought.