How to do without an Antivirus

If you only use commercial software and never install programs you've downloaded from the internet or copied from a friend, then your main sources of concern for contracting a computer virus will come from websites and email. Common sense -- and following the guidelines below -- will protect you the rest of the way.

Today's browsers have a lot of security controls built in, and these tend to do a fine job of preventing phishing attacks or the automatic downloading of potentially malicious software. Antivirus tools add little to their already robust protections.

So if you want to be free of antivirus software, be sure to use to latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, and keep those browsers up to date through your operating system's automatic update feature. Also, do not disable or alter the default security settings of the major browsers unless you know what you're doing.

If you attempt to access a website that's known to be harmful, most modern web browsers will warn you before the site is displayed on your screen. If you'd like to feel even more secure when you're surfing, consider installing the free McAfee SiteAdvisor tool (http://www.siteadvisor.com), which adds small site rating icons to your search results and a new browser button and optional search box to your browser. These controls together do a good job of alerting you to a potentially dangerous site before you reach it.

Most of the generalised warnings you hear about virus-carrying email messages are misleading. You can't get a computer virus merely by receiving an email message. You would have to click on a link within the message that downloads a harmful file onto your PC, or you would have to open or run a malicious file attached to a message.

So don't do either one of those things if you receive an email message from someone you don't know. Combine that common sense approach with the latest patches or updates for your e-mail program of choice, and you should have no use for additional protection offered by a bloated security package.

You can add yet another level of security by configuring your email program so that it displays incoming messages as plain text. Doing so will turn off the display of graphics, which, when clicked, may unleash a virus-carrying file. If you use a traditional email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express, add a good spam-blocking like Cloudmark Desktop (http://bit.ly/7zrVeU) to your toolkit, and chances are very good that any potentially dangerous messages will get routed automatically to your Spam folder, where you will never see it.

Just because you decide to run your PC without antivirus software doesn't mean you shouldn't check for viruses occasionally. You can do so, however, without installing anything if you stop in occasionally at one of the free online virus scanners.


Among them are Eset Online Scanner (http://www.eset.com/online-scanner), Avast Online Scanner (http://onlinescan.avast.com), and TrendMicro Online Scanner (http://housecall.trendmicro.com). All of these allow you to initiate a system scan without installing a permanent antivirus package.