Nowadays, only the best antivirus software products are able to detect all threats that are known, identify any potential risks quickly, and remove all malware that might have already been picked up by your computer. They are also able to block malware that might make attempts to get into your computer or laptops using various methods like chat, email, P2P file sharing, external devices, network connections, disks and websites. Most importantly, they should be able to do this in the background, without devouring all of your computer resources that are needed for other things.

Every year, the same antivirus and security products tend to offer the best, but there is always room for change. Here are the best products from current ones that are on the market.

Best Products

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, Norton Antivirus and Webroot Secure Anywhere Antivirus programs are considered best for technological publications and testing facilities. Webroot and Norton are tied for the top spot in the malware removal test, but Bitdefender is not much far behind as well.

As soon as you have installed your protection and cleaned up any threats that already exist, your antivirus will then spend the majority of the time fending off any new attacks. Some products are better at preventing a problem in rooting out malware that has been in your system for a long time. Webroot seems to always score better in blocking new problems.

The best antivirus software must be constantly evolving in order to combat creative shape-shifting malware. In fact, computer viruses are at a pandemic stage. The first nine months of 2011, one software company processed 19.9 million new specimens of malware and still there are computer users who do not use antivirus software. They think that if they are careful where they click, their computer will not be infected, but this is no longer the case.

Many consumers use more than one real-time antivirus program, but that uses too many system resources, often causing conflicts and can even in some cases reduce your protection.

Best Free Programs

The very best antivirus software that is available free is “Avast! Free Antivirus”, as evident from many recent studies. Avast has been improving steadily in rates of detection over the last several years, so now it rates up there with the best. It also has real-time capabilities including email, web, IM, P2P, network shields, boot-time scanning, and a behavior blocker. The newest version 6 also has features including site rating plugins, malware script protection and other situations. This is a FREE program and it does not use up all your resources as well.

Another best antivirus software for free is MS Security Essentials by Microsoft, which has high rates of detection, predominantly for rootkits. It is even more remarkable in having very few “false positives”; doesn’t use many resources and is also good at removing any malware that already exist. It needs very little interaction and it updates and removes threats automatically. Moreover, it doesn’t have any registration, ignoring advertisement or nag screens. It is best to note here that MS Security Essentials needs an authentic copy of Windows to be installed. Read the rest of this entry »