Using Avast Anti-Virus to defend your system

Avast Me Hearties! Free Virus Protection for your PC
Back during the days of Personal Computing’s youth*, a man named Bill Gates had a vision about bringing computers into every home in the western world.

And Lo! from this vision’s loins sprang forth Windows 95™.

Prior to this particular version of Windows, men were men and computing was largely restricted to bespectacled nerds who never saw sunlight, spoke with a lisp and were conversant in such strange languages as DOS™ and UNIX™.

I thtill remember thothe timeth fondly.

And so, like Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods, Windows 95™ stole computers from the Nerds and put them into the hands of humanity.

This of course gave rise to the ‘Internet Revolution’, ‘E-Commerce’, ‘the DotCom Boom & Bust’ and a truly monumental increase in the global production of pornographic materials. However, as the number of computers in households around the world grew, so did the number of Nerds vowing to take their revenge on humanity by bringing chaos to home computing through the introduction of an ever-more imaginative array of Viruses, Trojans, SpyWare and Spam, stealing credit card details, and selling everything from Viagra to fake designer goods.

These days, the internet is littered with malicious little pieces of software, solely designed to annoy, exploit, crash or otherwise propagate computing chaos with the average home computer. It is a little known fact that the average time it takes for a totally unprotected computer to become infected by ‘something’ once it is connected to the Internet now stands at a mere 19 minutes.

As a result, most new computers are ready-equipped with Anti Virus software, but this usually only carries a one year licence, after which time you are asked to hand over your hard-earned cash in return for continued ‘peace of mind’.

What few people realise however, is that it is perfectly possible to keep your machine safe from viruses and other threats without spending endless sums of money on virus protection each year. In fact, there are countless free Anti-Virus programs to be found on the web, if only one knows where to look. Based on my own experience, I have found the best of these to be ‘Avast!’, so I would suggest that you download it today, if you have not done so already.

Oh, you also wanted to know how to use Avast, right?

The Avast program download, along with full instructions about its use and continuous running can be found by clicking here.

Next Month: More information about Spyware and how it affects you.

*Maybe not so much in its infancy or childhood as during its teenage years, somewhere just after puberty probably.

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