This is my take on anti-virus software. I am very strongly in favor of having a good anti-virus software on a computer. There are free versions and paid versions. This is a situation where I am firmly in favor of having a paid version. Generally free versions are virus removal tools. In essence, you use these to remove it once it’s on there. You don’t get good protection for free. Paid versions are what we call real-time protection. They guard you computer in real-time, meaning that these versions keep malicious software off of the computer period to begin with.

That being said, I don’t really like these large “Internet Security Suites” like MacAfee, Norton and Kaspersky. They seem to have every conceivable feature that the tech world has come up with to scare you. They just try to do way too much and can just bog a computer down. For instance, MacAfee will run around 15 processes on the computer in task manager. All of these big suites are like that and it’s just not needed. You just want to protect your computer from viruses.

What I recommend is a program called Malwarebytes. It’s simple and it just sits there behind the scenes doing it’s job. You’re not constantly getting hit with all of these messages that are hard for the average user to understand and more messages about what other features you need to add. The other nice feature is that it catches adware. Adware is internet clutter that you can get over time. Malwarebytes runs one process in task manager so it’s very low on the use of your computer’s resources. You can get different versions that fit your needs. There are one computer, one year versions and it goes up to ten devices for one year. Remember that with these types of software you have to get the versions for iPhones and iPads from the Apple store. All of their software runs through the Apple Store.