Family IT Advice #1 - What AV Should I Use?

I get a lot of questions from my family about various computer related things, I thought I’d write down the answers for a few of the interesting ones….

Anti-Virus, is a bit of software that runs in the background on your machine, trying to analyse any changes to the system that are malicious.

My usual advice on Anti-Virus on Windows is stick with Defender, the in built Microsoft tool, its good enough and doesn’t impact the speed of the computer too much. You can check on sites like https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/ for the latest advice, but Defender is not noisy and does the job.

I would caveat that advice with, be smart about the links you click on the internet. Hover over links before you click on them, make sure they point to where you think they should point to (difficult I know sometimes). Also if possible run adblocks to remove some of the distracting images that can confuse where you click.

If you want to be really smart and know that you’re wading into some of the fruitier parts of the internet learn to setup and use Virtualbox to create a “sandbox” VM which can be thrown away if it gets infected.

…and Backup, Backup, Backup, but that’s a story for another day.