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Oh Which Antivirus Program Do I Use?

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Oh Which Antivirus Program Do I Use?

April 15, 2010 The YCL Blog by Administrator Edit

In these days of internet fraud and skulduggery, Anti Virus software is an absolute must...some say a necessary evil.  We have all heard of the major players in the Antivirus field, Norton, MacAfee, Kaspersky, F-Secure, Panda etc as well as the freebie versions like AVG and Avast (steer well clear of free Antivirus programs, detection rate is usually low).  You may see every once in a while on TV Norton 360 Internet Security on sale at our high street competitors, which generally means a mini surge in the amount of home computers and laptops we see in for repair.  This surge is not directly as a result of Norton being such a bad program, although it is something we don’t recommend as a security solution to our customers, the problems begin if a customer is changing Anti Virus software and need to uninstall their previous security program. 

Uninstalling security software can be straight forward, and should be.  Just run the uninstall utility either from the Start Menu under the software tab, or from the control panel...but no, alas, as we have seen on so many occasions, uninstalling Anti Virus software can result in many problems from something trivial up to the complete standstill of your PC or laptop.  It makes me laugh that these companies have actually made dedicated uninstall programs for their software...why can't they just include this in the product in the first place, some companies actually charge for these Antivirus removal programs.

 In order to test the Anti Viral market, in terms of who has the best product, every 6 - 8 months we run a series of rigorous tests to put the main contenders, and a selection of unknowns, through their paces and basically whichever comes out on top wins, and therefore earns the right to be unleashed onto our customers with extreme confidence.

Many of our customers know that we used to recommend F-Secure, and still it rates highly in our estimations, but the winner in the past 2 trials in our humble opinion is ESET Smart Security and ESET NOD32 Anti Virus.  In terms of the amount of viruses it picks up, how it deals with viruses and how it affects the speed of your PC (which is a big advantage over the big boys), it won hands down.

We do get the odd customer querying why we change our Anti Virus recommendations, to that we can only reply that we invest a lot of time and effort in providing what we think is the best product for the job to our customers, we recommend it, we support...let’s face it we use it on our PC's and servers, so we know the product inside out. 

Once thing I will say is that there is no Antivirus program on the market which will detect and deal with all Viruses, as when you think about it Anti Virus companies are always one step behind the people who create these annoying viruses.  But on the whole they do a pretty good job, but we think ESET does a better job. 

The YCL Blog

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The YCL Blog

April 02, 2010 The YCL Blog by Administrator Edit

Here we will publish our thoughts, tips, recommendations and pretty much anything else about the IT world.


Here comes the background stuff, Yarm Computers Ltd was established way back in 1989, and since then we have seen the technology world move faster than any other industry I can recall.  We have seen Acorns, BBC, Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrums...with a whole 128k memory, 486, Pentiums, Dual Cores and Quad Cores, along with no less than 8 different versions of desktop Windows (yes, yes I know the latest version is 7, but I guess Microsoft are trying to cover up their involvement in Windows ME and deny its existence).  We have had one of the biggest anticlimactic bugs in the history of technology, the Millennium Bug, which was vastly overstated, and while it did prove a problem for a minority, there were no incidents of PC's going up in smoke, banks depositing millions in to your bank accounts or aeroplanes falling from the sky.

One thing that has stayed the same since we first opened our doors was our customers thirst for the latest and greatest technologies, sometimes unnecessarily, but it is the industry's evolvement that keeps us on our toes.

We have built our business on support, lets be frank about this, peoples buying attitudes have changed, buying laptops of the shelf from the local supermarket is rapidly becoming the norm, but what happens when things go wrong? who do you speak to? I don't think the local checkout assistant will be able to help with the dreaded blue screen of death, well actually she may be able to...but she isn't paid to.  Instead you are fobbed off with a telephone number for "tech support" from a call centre, which may or may not be in this country.   In ours, and more importantly, our customers opinion, face to face support is invaluable, spending a little bit more on a computer will save you potentially hundreds of pounds in the future.

I guess the purpose of this blog is to get our customers, potential customers and other bloggers involved in sharing experiences, opinions and ideas about the technology world.  You can keep up to date by subscribing to our RSS feed or just pop back when you have a spare 10 minutes on your lunch break to check for any new posts.

May the force be with you (come on, there had to be some nerdy reference)
The YCL Team.