Sherman Boyd

I use a simple recipe to keep virus free

1. Clamwin
2. Firefox:
   
3. Clamwin Glue for Firefox
4. Common Sense

Clamwin is a free anti-virus scanner, with high detection rates. The only thing that keeps it off the desktop of many users is that it’s missing what many consider to be a critical feature; real time scanning. Most modern anti-virus programs remain in memory, and check every file when it is opened, moved or created. This is a very thorough way to check for virii but it is very taxing on the performance of your system. Since I need those computational cycles for other tasks I usually disable or limit real time scanning to newly created files.

It is perfectly safe not to use real time scanning, but you need to understand how a virus comes to infect your computer in the first place. A virus sneaks inside your computer on a file that you introduce by one of the following means:

1. You download it
2. You get it in an email
3. You bring it on removable media, like a floppy disc, CD, or a usb thumb drive

So all you really need to do, in order to keep your computer clean and virus free, is to scan all the files at these entry points before you use them. That’s where common sense comes in.

Luckily there are tools to make this a bit easier. Clamwin Glue for Firefox scans anything you download using Firefox. Clamwin also has a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. This covers the most common points of entry automatically. Add a nightly scan of your entire system, and you’ve got a free anti-virus solution that doesn’t constantly burn CPU cycles.