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There are over a hundred antivirus programs being offered to everyone, from personal users, small enterprises to big companies. You can see yearly reviews of antivirus software from various technology websites. You also see many advertisements by different antivirus makers, from the leading and most trusted brands to the scam-sounding ones. But being spoilt with choice, you can barely decide what the best antivirus software for you is.

To limit the number of choices where you’ll be basing your final choice, you must decide between these two categories: paid or free. By doing this, you’ll be able to eliminate programs that are unfitted to your needs and focus better on deciding between those that are real possibilities.

1. No. of Users

If you’re a household that owns at most one computer per member of the family, you can easily choose the freeware antivirus programs. Most free software only give single computer licenses to users, so you just have to install the program one by one on each computer. But if you’re a small enterprise or a big business, paid antivirus programs are well worth it, as you get the permission to use the antivirus on multiple numbers of machines.

2. Type of Usage

Most free antivirus programs offer only on-demand protection, meaning it can only detect malware when you tell it to scan your files. This is good for computers that are mostly offline. But if you’re connected to the internet the whole day, there’s a chance of getting viruses from email and just by simply visiting a website. So you need constant protection offered by most paid antivirus programs.

3. Budget

If you have much more important places to spend your money on, you’re better off choosing free antivirus software. But if you’ve got money to spare, then do get paid antivirus programs as they usually have more features and will offer greater protection to your computer.

Anyone familiar with the complex world of internet security will know all too well the nature of the dangers that can arise from their computers becoming infected by an internet virus.

Unfortunately, without adequate protection, such as Kaspersky antivirus software, it can be all too easy to become the unwilling victim of malicious online software.

This week, search engine giant Google has been forced to warn more than two million internet users that their computers have been infected by a virus, found while Google was carrying out routine maintenance at one of their data centres, with the virus apparently formed to hijack browser searches using Google, redirecting users to websites that offer fake security programs.

Google’s security engineer Damian Menscher revealed that the software may have reached users’ computers via a particularly malicious variant of fake antivirus software, which is unfortunately becoming more and more common online with the rise of cyber crime.

If you’re concerned that you may have been hit by this virus, simply go to Google as soon as you can, type in a search query, and see whether or not you’re presented with an obvious yellow warning box at the top of the page when your search results appear. If no yellow box pops up, you should be alright for now, but any regular internet user should look on this latest spread of malicious software as a reason to find the best free antivirus software available for their needs as soon as possible.

Although some internet users may feel reassured by the speedy and efficient response from Google to this latest virus, the fact remains that it is a real cause for concern that even large companies such as the search engine behemoth are being targeted in such an overt manner, and this is surely an issue that is only going to be compounded as more and more people across the globe gain faster access to the online world.