In past we used to queue up in a bank for our banking needs, gathered information from books and operated offices with the use of complex paperwork and calculators and so on. But when the computers evolved it made the life of man pretty easy. Computers are doing the calculations, manage the queues and turned the paper work more tidy, and that too on behalf of the man. In today’s world, computer has become a necessity for the smooth operation of our day to day lives. But we should not ignore the thieves and culprits who used to create a ruckus in our lives, be it in olden days or be it in today’s scenario. Now, with the increased use of internet and computers in our daily lives these culprits have gained technological knowledge and are engaged in creating software codes which in some or the other way, harm our computers. These codes sometime only use up our computer’s speed and make our work slower but sometimes these are involved in damaging our files and useful information. These codes which create a ruckus in our information technology world are popularly known as viruses.

Viruses are of many types and Trojans, worms, malware, botnets are some of the types of viruses found today that harm our computers in some way or the other. Let’s not go in the details what do these viruses do to our computers but let’s concentrate on how these viruses are trapped and taken out of our computers in a non technological way.

The software code which is used to identify the above mentioned viruses is popularly known as anti-virus. Almost every computer user must be aware of the importance of anti-virus. But do we know how they trap the viruses and remove them from our computers?

These anti-viruses are intelligently designed to detect the presence of known virus codes. Here I have used the word known virus code for several reasons which will be discussed later in this article. But first lets concentrate on the anti-viruses first. These known virus codes are supplied to the anti virus software by the anti virus companies through updates on a day to day, hour to hour or minute to minute basis. There are many anti-viruses in the market and all don’t work in the same way. When ever some of the virus code is detected in our computer then it is removed from our computers using the safe process of its removal. And this is the overall working of any of the anti-viruses that are available in the market.

Actual working of an anti-virus

With the description given above, you would have got an insight of how anti-viruses work. But we have used the word known virus code for several reasons that are going to be discussed here.

Whenever, the research and development team of any antivirus company detects a virus which can cause some problem to the computers they create a method to detect it and supply that code to the anti-virus software through regular updates. Now, there is a question that if humans are involved in detecting the virus codes and humans are also engaged in creating new. There is always a presence of virus codes in the extremes of the computers that would have not been detected at all and these are the viruses which are not detected by the antivirus software at all.

Actually, whenever someone writes a code of a virus he pays a lot of attention on the fact that should lie in the computer without being detected and therefore, many virus coders do not employ a harmful effect to the computer rather they do some sort of disgusting jobs such as sniffing. And these are very hard to detect even by some research and development team of a popular anti-virus package.

According to one of the estimate there are thousands of virus codes whose anti-virus codes have not been written by any of the anti-virus company at all. And those are the viruses which don’t harm our computers functions but are engaged in doing their individual work in background of the infected computer’s process without getting detected and removed by any of the anti-virus software.

Should we use the anti-virus?

The answer to this simple question is, yes of course. Since these anti-virus software are capable of removing the most dangerous and detected anti viruses from our computers and in this way offer a security. It doesn’t matter the security is full or not but what matters is that there is some or the other security software that is keeping a vigilant eye on the virus codes which can prove disastrous. Having a bit loose security is better than not having it at all.

Which anti-virus is the best?

To address this problem you need to simplify your needs first. If you are using a stand alone computer then it will be affected by a virus which can come from CDs, floppies or pen drives. For this you need anti-virus software which offers at least offline anti-virus solutions and these types of antivirus software are often freely available on the internet and in abundance. But always research for the best one through proper bulletin boards, news portals and other informative sources.

If you are using a computer for your online transactions or simply for visiting a website, then another source for virus infection gets activated. For these computers the anti-virus software should have the capability to strictly monitor the websites that you are viewing for the virus codes and should terminate the session or show a warning message when ever they get some virus code on them. These types of anti-virus software are sold at nominal prices and are mainly available with nearly all the anti-virus software manufacturing company. It’s really easy to find the best one from the sources that have been mentioned above.

So find an antivirus that suits your needs and install it on to your computer for a peace of mind, but always remember that always there are viruses which cannot be detected by any of the antivirus packages.



Source by Rahul Baiswar