Best Free AntiVirus program of 2019

[KILROY]

Interesting, unfortunately, I don't use Windows 10, still on 8.1 on this and my work laptop, and Vista on my older laptop. Server towers use Linux and Unix, one full ATX Tower with XP Pro, and one IPad with Apple OS.

The site this is on, is a really good site for information, been using them since their creation back in 2006.

[perrinoia]

I think I recall Bitdefender and Avast having sand box features. Been awhile, though.
I'm excited for that feature to be baked into windows.

[AnniDv6]

Windows defender has a plugin for Chrome and Firefox browsers now.

Love the pic in the article too
https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/16/win ... e-firefox/

[KILROY]

Interesting...funny pic, but did you catch the last name of the person who did the article after seeing the pic...her last name is "Moon". Wonder where she got the idea for the pic

[perrinoia]

Mariella Moon
Associate Editor
Mariella loves staring at her cute dog while writing space, science and tech stories for Engadget. In her spare time, she enjoys pretending to be an opera diva, watching action movies, reading detective/horror fiction and playing video games.

[perrinoia]

She doesn't look like your average porn consumer, which is probably why she had to google "porn sites".

[vistalize]

It's actually quite simple to know whether a download is bad or not.

It's all about context - Where is the link?

• Porn site? Don't download it.
• Gaming website? Read reviews first.
• Computer component Manufacturers website? Probably safe to download
• Email, private message, instant message, etc? How well do you know the sender?
• Is the url hot linked or hosted in house? If someone shares a file on this website, and the url contains "thelandofoz.net/", it's probably trustworthy. If someone shares a file and the link says, "mediashare.com/" and thre are like 15 ads that look like download buttons on that website, don't bother.

But that's not foolproof, so we have to have another couple of layers of protection. I will allow antivirus software to scan files as i download them, but once they're installed, that's how i want my computer to run from now on. So you want an antivirus that can auto scan downloads, and never schedule it to scan your harddrive. Or strictly instruct it to scan specific folders, like your downloads folder. But that whole layer is optional, in my opinion.

Last layer of defense is your backups. Personally, i have 1 drive for windows ands another drive for documents, videos, photos, downloads, etc.... even on my microsoft surface, i have a 256GB MicroSD card that contains a backup of all my important stuff, so if i have to reformat the ssd, i still have the MicroSD card.

You have a windows installation thumb drive now. Maybe add the wifi drivers to that thumb drive. That's all you need to get started on a reformat. Once reformatted, you can download the latest drivers from the manufacturers websites, download steam, let steam reinstal your games, etc...

Very good idea on the wifi drivers and such on the thumb drive. I made sure to add everything I'm gonna need just incase some fucked up shit happens.

[AnniDv6]

Also consider setting up RAID for your drives. This will make it so if one of your hard drives ever fails you don't lose everything and can rebuild the drive.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2849289 ... -know.html
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-t ... 36783.html

[perrinoia]

I bought enough HDDs to set up a raid array back before SSDs existed. Within days i ended up reformatting and reconfiguring to turn multiple small drives into one twice as fast, twice as big hdd. It worked great until one drive failed and i had to scrap the data on both. Bigger hdds existed for cheaper by then, and SSDs were announced as a concept.

[KILROY]

That's why you always back-up what you have. Our company servers do multiple back-ups daily, while switching to back-up servers.