A lot of people ask me which is the best operating system for them, what is the best antivirus, what firewall protects them better and so on. From the start, I must say that there is simply no such thing as “the best” in software area. Feel free to argue, but that’s my opinion.

Let’s take for example antivirus software. One might detect more viruses than other, but if the one who detects fewer viruses detects one virus that the other one doesn’t detect than it’s clear that the first one, who detects more viruses, isn’t “the best”. Also, a firewall might block more attacks than another one, but it might fail to block something that a “less better” firewall is able to block. I’m sure you get the point.

There are other aspects involved here, in the concept of better or worse, like stability, usage of system resources, ease of use, compatibility with other programs and many more like those. So, I hope that if you didn’t knew, it’s now becoming clear that you can’t run for “the perfect” software. But that can’t stop you to choose a good one, “the best” for you. You might be very good in computer area and then you don’t need the best interface, you’ll want to have options for tweaking and fine tuning the software. But, if you are a person who uses computer only for specific tasks, you’ll want an easy to configure software, and with a friendly interface. If you don’t own the latest and greatest hardware, one of the most important things for you might be how well the software uses the system resources.

In the end, I’ll try to stay on point and name some of the best choices when it comes for software.

A good antivirus is Norton Antivirus. The company behind Norton Antivirus is Symantec (http://www.symantec.com). Here you can find the latest version; usually they get a new version every year, for example, the latest version now (September 2006) is Norton Antivirus 2006. You can find here firewalls and maintenance tools for Windows based operating systems.

A very well know antispyware is Spybot Search&Destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org). And it’s freeware, so you don’t have to spend money on it. Another excellent antispyware program is Trojan Hunter (http://www.misec.net/trojanhunter). It handles very well trojans and it’s capable of removing them even from windows dlls in realtime.

But, of course, the first thing you need to do is update your operating system, Service Pack 2 is a must in these days. And soon, we’ll see how good Windows Vista is. Until then keep your computer protected from viruses and trojans.