I get this same question a lot; what’s the difference between viruses, malware, and spyware?
It used to be that we distinguished viruses from malware and spyware. Viruses really screwed up your computer and malware and spyware just slowed it down and annoyed you – Now, they‘ve all morphed into what we affectionately call “Infections.”
Infections affect your computer in many ways and while there are some that don’t seem to affect the performance, they may be stealing information from you — Yes, they’re all bad.
Over the years we’ve tried many Antivirus products with mixed results and we have tried them all! The standards, Symantec and McAffe along with others are very good, but can slow down your computer or even keep it from functioning properly– and they don’t stop many common infections. The popularity of social networking sites, particularly Facebook, has infections on the rise exponentially.
In the last half of 2010, we finally concluded that there was no product that was effective in keeping a Windows XP machine from getting infected – We began to recommend a two-product solution:
If you or your company has already paid for an Antivirus product, we advise to leave it installed and use it instead of Option 1.
Test Case:
When we acquired the Waterloo Ice House organization, they had a chronic problem with repeated virus infections despite the fact that every machine had a working and current Antivirus solution installed. In the first two months, they had 17 infections that took an average of 45 minutes to eradicate. In some instances, a reinstall was necessary. Big Village IT purchased Corporate licensing @ $18.00 per workstation and installed it along with their current AV product (yes, you can do this with Malwarebytes) – We configured Malwarebytes to update and scan nightly. The infection rate decreased by 90%!
I t doesn’t take much math to figure out the potential savings, not to mention the productivity gains.
The really good news is that Malwarebytes is free to home users. The slight drawback is that the free version only runs manually. That is, you have to update it and run it. However, this is what we use most of the time to remove infections from client’s computers and very effective even when downloaded after you’ve been infected. The full version cost is $24.95 and a very good value. This version will update and scan automatically once configured.
You can download here: http://www.malwarebytes.org
You will be directed to another site (that’s ok) to download the install. Be careful when going to these other sites, they may try to trick you into downloading something else, so remember, it pays to pay attention. The file you want is called – mbam-setup.exe – As a courtesy to the makers of Malwarebytes, we don’t provide a copy of it.
Here’s a video of me installing Malwarebytes on a computer so that you can see how it is done:
Install Malwarebytes today for more peace of mind and safer computing.
If you have any questions about Malwarebytes or any other IT related needs, please call our office.
Wayne Kimes
