It’s true. There’s a conspiracy and everything.

The antivirus – or, if you must, antimalware – industry has a touch of the mafia. They give manufacturers a nice little bonus for loading their time bombed “trial” on every PC they ship. “I do you this favour,” croons your antivirus godfather, “and some day, say in 3 to 6 months, I will call on you to pay for this software. But for now, consider it a gift.” And usually customers pay up when asked. Some of them don’t, and the software stops working, or keeps working with out-of-date protection. Those that do pay get locked into a lovely little protection racket, with annual “renewal fees”, plus the occasional “upgrade” fees. Failure to pay will almost certainly result in a digital horse’s head in your bed.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need antivirus. You wouldn’t click links in emails from people you don’t know. You wouldn’t browse random websites and they’d never host malicious software, even unintentionally. You wouldn’t blindly use USB keys from other systems, or fail to protect your computer with a decent software or hardware firewall. And all porn would be free.

Sadly, brain transplants – the tool of choice to enable that perfect world - are not yet common. They do, apparently, offer one with Macintosh systems, but the purpose of that is to predispose you to buy anything the Great God Steve Jobs tells you to. As a coincidence, Mac OS X is not known for viruses, but that’s possibly because no-one cares enough.

In short, your brand new SpanySoft 2000 UberPC needs some kind of protection. Let me let you into a little secret - most antivirus is utter crap. Completely and utterly. Statistically speaking, your PC may in fact be better off with no protection than with many of the well-known brands. Many antivirus publishers would actually contribute more to computer security by writing and releasing viruses. I won’t name names, because I’d prefer to avoid myself and the Tribune being sued to “You sher gots a purdy mouth” prostitution levels. But generally, antivirus products are useless, overpriced, computer-slowing crapware.

“But Matt,” I hear you squeal, “What am I to do? How can I protecte my beloved computer from the evil? How will I get my beloved porn???!?!?!” Fortunately, there is an answer. Sadly, I’m not paid to shill it. It’s free anyway and my opinion is based on testing and real-world results.

Microsoft Security Essentials is the baby brother of the more corporate-focused (read: not free) Forefront suite of products. It works using the same engine and signatures and it works damn well. And, like I said, it’s free. It’s not the only one that is free, but it’s updated regularly, it doesn’t miss a beat, and it has yet to kill computers (unlike some other free and paid products in the past). You can even use it in small businesses for up to 10 PC’s, with no known horse’s heads.

But don’t take my word for it. Uninstall your existing crapware, and download it from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Or take your chances, and have fun removing EVILBOT.STINKYBUM.WIN32 from your computer. Over and over again.

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Matt Marlor has been an IT professional for over 15 years. Despite this he can still write coherent sentences and has even been known to talk to girls on occasion.

He blogs at www.mattmarlor.com and tweets as @OhCrap

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