Application of Interest: Avast Anti-Virus

I had a suspicious exe file in my 500 GB external hard disk and there was a strong possibility that it is a virus. The problem with some viruses is that, they could silently plant a lot of virus files throughout the hard disks and the only way by which you could be 100% sure of virus-free hard disk is to format it. Not willing to format as it is having a lot of data, I thought some very powerful anti-virus software could judge whether it is a virus or not.

I asked my friend's help as he is having his office laptop and it has McAfee anti-virus program installed with latest updates (up-to date updates). So, he brought his laptop and we connected my hard disk and scanned my hard disk. McAfee promised us that there are no viruses. Not satisfied, we wanted to scan that particular exe file and still McAfee gave certification that it is a good file.

I just wanted to have some anti-virus installed in my laptop and I downloaded and installed avast anti-virus. It is a freeware (that means, you need not crack or hack to get the full version and you do not need to feel guilty [hehe... who in the world feels guilty for using cracked softwares]) and it is very small in size, about 4 MB. Having installed my own anti-virus, I scanned my external hard disk and was shocked to see, it found a lot of viruses and deleted them, including the suspicious exe file.

So, the conclusion is that, if you do not have any anti-virus software installed, you could try avast anti-virus. Also, I would request you to register with them and get a Home-User registration key, this could help them to know how many registered users are using their product and it could help them advertise and get a better recognition. Avast anti-virus comes in 2 flavours, home-users (free license) and professional version (which is not free). For home users like us, the first version is enough.

Also, avast has some cool features, doing boot-time scan, which would be more effective, in case, some viruses may prevent being detected after they successfully launch them. Also, this does not slow down your system. Just try this, register with them and enjoy safe browsing, yes, it has various agents running which will take care of safe browsing the internet. The moral of the story is that, it is not always true that only paid anti-viruses are the best. Also, one more moral is that, if you are using internet, it is 100% recommended to have an anti-virus installed in your machine.

You could download it here and register it here.