The Internet is getting more and more like the wild west. You just never know when you are going to get bushwhacked. Having some good reliable protection against new malware is now a must to survive. You might be surprised to know that free malware protection can also be some of the best malware protection. AVG, Avast, and Avira are considered some of the best malware protection software and even out rank some of the better know programs. These three also offer free software programs for personal use that employ the same scan engine used in their commercial offerings. They are also optimized for speed and provide daily updating.
Malware can be very destructive to Windows and slow computers to a crawl. Often times malware scanners and malware removal programs are unable to completely remove the infections and require either a restore to original configuration or bare metal re-installation. This can be very time consuming and frustrating. Therefore you must prepare for the worst case scenario because eventually you will be there.
Imaging can be a good solution because of the high speed restoring which only takes minutes. You can also maintain your images to keep them up-to-date with all the latest patches, program mods, and security updates. Malware usually attacks only the active operating system so you can keep your images and other important data on a second partition for handy restoring and imaging.
Important data should be backed up to an external resource for safe keeping. All hard drives will fail in time and recovering data from a failed drive can be very time consuming and expensive. When running a business with customer files I keep 5 full backup copies because I have had backups go bad. External resources, such as, tapes and drives will fail in time.
If you take the time to research AVG, Avast, and Avira you will find they all have a big followings. Malwarebytes and BitDefender are also very popular and have big followings, but I have been using AVG free for personal use for years now. I have tried many others but have always come back to AVG because it is one of the best free malware protection programs I have found.
You might also visit the Fdisk MBR website which has some additional information that you might find useful.
