I've used a host of professional antivirus software, with McAfee and Freedom software among those that I found to be the most effective. Before my subscription lapsed, I'd renew it, along with some of the bells and whistles.

A little more than a year ago, this began to be a little more difficult, since the money just wasn't there. Over the past year, I've used evaluation versions of a few antivirus programs, and finally began looking at some of the freeware programs.

Freeware is a concept that I'm familiar with, as I was a freeware author many years ago, writing games as well as emergency medical service training software, some of which was marketed as shareware, which is another thing altogether. Freeware is software that is offered at no cost, and is usually made available for downloading.

Freeware is not necessarily in the public domain. In most cases, the author retains the copyright, which means that you cannot do anything with it that is not expressly allowed by the author. Commonly, the author will allow you to use the software but not sell it as your own.

A lot of freeware is garbage, and some of it may even have the potential to harm your computer. But there are also some excellent programs and utilities available, some of which is the equal of anything you could pay for.

Many of the programs that we are now asked to pay a pretty penny for began their life as freeware; or, in some cases, shareware.

McAfee, for example, was distributed as freeware for many years.

My intention, in writing this brief article, is not to provide a comprehensive evaluation of everything that's out there, or even to suggest that these are the best, but to simply give credit to those which have worked well for me.

Virus Detection and Removal

avast! 4 Home Edition

Before coming across this anti-virus package, I tried several others. avast! is a full-featured anti-virus package, available free of charge to those who are using the software at home and in a non-commercial environment.

It does everything that McAfee does and, more importantly, it doesn't nag me half as much. I'd sometimes debate whether the pop ups that I'd receive from McAfee weren't perhaps even more annoying than the malware it was seemingly protecting me from. In contrast, avast! works seamlessly and effectively in the background, keeping my computer safe from the nasties that sometimes come my way.

In keeping with the licensure of avast!, it cannot be used on our business computers. For that, a professional version is available at approximately the same cost as McAfee or Norton.

www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

I haven't found any others that I'd recommend highly. I used ClamWin for awhile, and it was able to detect and to remove viruses and other malware, when asked, but it did not include a real-time scanner. It required that I manually scan the files on my disk, and then it would take as much as sixteen hours to do so.

Spyware, Adware, and Malware Detection and Removal

If you see new toolbars in Internet Explorer that you didn't install, if searches on Yahoo or Google do not bring up the anticipated results, if your browser crashes, or if your start page has changed, you probably have spyware, or worse, on your computer. On the other hand, you may not see anything, but notice that your computer has slowed down considerably.

For years, I've used both SpyBot and Ad-Aware, in combination, and they remain a good choice.

While avast! will detect and remove spyware, adware, and malware itself, I've never found any one program that was able to do the job by itself. Perhaps some of the professional versions will do so but, although I have registered some of them in the past, I nevertheless found that I needed to use other programs along with the one that I had paid for.

Spyware is defined as any software that covertly gathers user information through the user's Internet connection without his or her knowledge, usually for advertising purposes. Spyware applications are typically bundled as a hidden component of freeware or shareware programs that can be downloaded from the Internet. Once installed, the spyware monitors user activity on the Internet and transmits that information in the background to someone else.

While not necessarily malware, adware is considered to go beyond the reasonable advertising that one might expect from freeware or shareware. Typically a separate program that is installed at the same time as a shareware or similar program, adware will usually continue to generate advertising even when the user is not running the originally desired program.

Malware is slang for malicious software. Malware is software designed specifically to disrupt a computer system. A trojan horse , worm or a virus could be classified as malware. Some advertising software can be malicious in that it can try to re-install itself after you remove it. Malware can sometimes pose a greater threat to your computer system than a virus.

Ad-Aware Personal

Ad-Aware Personal provides protection from known data-mining, aggressive advertising, Trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, and tracking components. This software is downloadable free of charge.

Ad-Aware Personal, the free version, is effective at detecting and removing many of the troublesome programs that sometimes install themselves without your knowledge or permission.

The free version does require that you manually scan your computer, while the paid version includes Ad-Watch, which remains vigilant, detecting and removing such programs before they have had a chance to install themselves.

www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/

SpyBot - Search & Destroy

The other program that I'd recommend using alongside of Ad-Aware is called SpyBot.

SpyBot-S&D can detect and remove spyware of different kinds from your computer. In years of usage, I've noted that Ad-Aware will detect and remove things that were missed by SpyBot, and vice versa.

www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/

Generally, it's best to use these programs in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, your computer will run only those programs that are necessary, and since many of these nasty programs cannot be removed while they are running, rebooting your computer and starting it up in Safe Mode will be more effective. In Windows XP, you can do that by tapping the F5 key while the computer is rebooting.

Hijackers

If your browser does not take you where you want to go on the Internet, you may have come up against a hijack program.

There is a despicable trend that is becoming more and more common, where browser settings are being hijacked forcibly by malicious web sites and software that modifies your default start and search pages.

At times, Internet shortcuts will be added to your Favorites folder without asking you. The intent is to force you to visit a web site of the hijacker's choice, often a pornographic site, so that they artificially can inflate their web site's traffic for higher advertising revenues.

Sometimes these changes are reversible simply by going into Internet Options and switching them back. But this doesn't always work. Sometimes it's necessary to edit the Windows Registry in order to undo the changes made, and that's not something that most of us want to do. Sometimes there is even a combination of registry setting and files secretly placed on your hard drive that reconfigure your settings every time you reboot the computer, so that no matter how often you change your settings back, they are changed again the next time you restart your computer. There have even been cases where Internet Options have been removed from the Tools menu by registry hacking to prevent you from controlling your own computer.

Hijack This

Although certainly not for the novice user, Hijack This is a hijacker detector and removal tool.

To be candid, Hijack This scares the heck out of me. In the wrong hands, it can be like using dyamite to loosen your lugnuts.

I have used it, however; and found it to be effective. MajorGeeks.com includes a support forum, where people will, at no cost whatsoever, be willing to talk you through some pretty complex problems. But they expect that you will have done your homework first.

Be clear on this. Hijack This is for the complex problems. Before resorting to such a powerful tool, you should have tried everything else. In fact, unless you're comfortable doing things to to your computer that scare the heck out of you, it might be a good idea to pay someone.

The person you pay will likely be using Hijack This.

www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html

Registry Cleaner

I download programs from the Internet all the time. After playing with them for awhile, I'll delete them. Usually, there's no problem with this, but once in awhile I come across one that doesn't want to go away.

Opera did that to me a few months ago. Opera is an alternative browser that I've used off and on for years, and which I generally like. However, it kept wanting to make itself my default browser and it doesn't work well with the software that I use to update the Magic City Morning Star, so I uninstalled it a few months ago. Something went wrong, and Opera wasn't completely removed from my Registry; so sometimes when I clicked on a hyperlink, I'd get an error, since my computer would try to load Opera, which was no longer installed.

Most software programs use the Registry to store configuration and other important data. When you install an application, new registry entries will be created. These entries are normally deleted automatically when you uninstall the application. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes, the application fails to remove its registry entries.

I could have written to Opera, and they'd have talked me through making the necessary changes to the Registry, since they are a responsible company with a trusted product.

But I'm a wuss, and I hate making changes to the Registry. Instead, I went looking for a free Registry cleaner.

TweakNOW!

Free for noncommercial use, TweakNOW! quickly scanned my computer, and recommended changes. I accepted its recommendations, and it repaired my registry, not only getting rid of the annoying Opera errors, but noticeably improving the speed of my computer, as well.

www.tweaknow.com/RegCleaner.html

There you have it. I'm sure that there are other great programs out there, and I know that I'll be hearing from you about them.

That is good. I want to hear your recommendations. These are mine. Take them for whatever they are worth, and with no guarantees.