Everyone has been hit by it at least once, the scourge of the Internet. Made by evil geniuses, these slip into your computer and ravage it before you know what's happening. Viruses come in many different forms, but they all do the same thing - screw up your computer in one way or another. Spyware is different, as it doesn't actually harm your computer in the virus sense, rather it uses your computer. It can monitor your surfing habits, bombard you with ads(adware), or steal information.

To combat this growing problem we have anti-virus & spyware software.

Anti-virus Solutions

Lets look at the free anti-virus programs, while it doesn't cost you a dime, they can't beat the commercial offerings. Below are my top three recommendations.

Note: Tests done by virus.gr and ICSA.

Free

BitDefender (90.75% ) (Pass from ICSA)
www.bitdefender.com

This one scans and that's it. It has a higher detection rates than AVG or Avast, but it comes at the price of no resident shield (explained later). Simple and good.

AVG free (77.97% ) (Pass from ICSA)
www.free.grisoft.com

AVG free is one of the most popular free anti-virus solutions. It has a resident shield, which means should you decide that hot_women.jpg.exe will live up to its namesake, it will stop the file from putting the virus on your system.

Avast (76.93% ) (Pass from ICSA)
www.avast.com

I personally have never touched this, but have heard good things about it. Looking through their website they have lots of big words, but I'll just summarize the important things here. Avast has a resident shield which does exactly what AVG's does. Avast can also monitor P2P, IM, and HTTP (surfing the web) to catch any viruses in the act.

Pay

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0
usa.kaspersky.com

The king of anti-virus, Kaspersky has a free 30-day trial so you can try it before purchasing. With a 99% detection rate you can't go wrong with this one. Kaspersky gives updates 24 times a day, so even with the fastest spreading viruses your protection is ensured.

Kaspersky has recently released version 6. Tests done show that version 6 is even better. Following instructions on Kasperskys site allows you to have Kaspersky scan for spyware as well.

F-secure 2006
f-secure.com

The runner up in most tests, like Kaspersky they are well known anti-virus experts. F-secure also has a blog which contains up to date information about virus threats (f-secure.com/weblog/)

McAfee
mcafee.com/us/

A well known anti-virus product, just a little less effective than f-secure. Their package contains spamkiller and firewall as well as anti-virus.

Norton
symantec.com/index.htm

The lowest scoring anti-virus on the test, rarely getting about 90% in tests. However they do offer a complete Internet security suite, along with scanning for spyware gets Norton up here for the amount of features it has compared to others.