Free Security Apps

I was using AVG as my anti-virus but I guess they’re no longer free any more and keep bugging me to purchase it as of January 15^th. I loved AVG’s clean interface with real time virus detection feature but I refuse to pay for the subscription. So I decided to try out this free anti virus called ClamWin. Since I’m doing an security upgrade, I guess it’s a good opportunity to list free security software I and other utilities use.

• Ad-Aware SE Personal – popular adware removable software
• CCleaner – good cleaning utility to remove unused registry entries, any issues, and uninstalling and deleting software (a nice pointer as my Add/Remove Program in Control Panel takes forever to populate the entries)
• ClamWin – good clean interface and good virus definition (found a virus AVG completely missed) but sucky real time virus detection (failed to detect suspicious exe file while I was extracting file) and definition update (don’t know if it’s due to network outage during the scheduled update but seems like it’s failing quite often)
• Firefox – not a security software or utility but a good browser from protecting form spyware and adaware
• Spybot – popular spyware removable software
• SpywareBlaster – another good free anti-spyware software
• Zone Alarm - excellent free firewall (even IBM uses enterprise version of this firewall!)