Virus Checkers Are Dangerous
Anti-Virus programs and virus checkers are supposed to protect your personal computer from the dangers of surfing the Web. What these programs never bother to point out is that they can actually end up destroying your computer. Virus checkers should always be used with respect.
Virus Checker Safety – Rule #1
Virus checkers are dangerous programs that can under certain specific circumstances destroy you personal computer. The first rule for their safe use is that you should never have installed on your computer more than one virus checker, at a time. Never run AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, Avira AntiVir Personal, or Avast! Home Edition along with each other nor with any other commercial anti-virus program, such as McAfee Total Protection. The reason for this rule is that both anti-virus programs will start attacking each other, especially during a scan of your hard drive.
In Rejuvenate Your Personal Computer, I had recommended that you install three different anti-virus programs: Avira AntiVir Personal, SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition, and ThreatFire. These programs are an exception to this rule. I have personally tested these programs together on several different personal computers over many months. The test of time has proven that these specific programs are compatible with each other. Avira AntiVir Personal is the only real signature based anti-virus program. SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition is more of an anti-spyware / adware program, that has some anti-virus capability. While ThreatFire is a behavior based program that works completely differently from the way Avira does. Further, you cannot scan hard drives with ThreatFire.
Virus Checker Safety – Rule #2
The second rule of safe virus checker use is that you never ever want to lose power, lockup, or overload your computer while scanning your hard drive with a virus checker. Never ever turn off the power to your personal computer while it is running. Always be sure to properly shut down your computer. This is especially true while a virus checker is scanning your hard drive.
Likewise never try to commit personal computer suicide with your anti-virus program. Never scan your hard disk during a thunderstorm, when your personal computer is likely to lockup, or overloaded by trying to run too many programs at the same time. A virus checker, is not just another program. Always treat running an anti-virus program with the respect. Ideally, always before scanning your hard drives you should first restart your computer. Further, you should stop using your computer completely for an hour or so while your hard drives are being scanned for viruses. All programs will try to write to your hard drives during their use, because of Windows’ virtual memory. Hence, it is never a good idea to scan your hard drives in the background while trying to do serious work on your computer.
Normally, once your hard drive has been scanned once or twice, and all the security programs are running that I have recommended, a complete virus scan of your hard drive wont be necessary more than every three or four months.
Virus checkers change file permissions during a hard drive scan. Interrupting these anti-virus programs in the middle of a scan can potentially have serious repercussions for your installed copy of Windows XP and cause all kinds of problems, depending upon which files ended up getting their file permissions messed up.
November 24, 2009 at 9:27 pm
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