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Understanding Antivirus - How Antivirus works? - Selecting antivirus for computers

Understanding Antivirus

Anti viruses are those programs or software that protects and cleans the computer system form different kind of threats and viruses that directly harm the file system of the computer. They are very useful in detecting the infected patterns that may reside in the computer memory. Anti viruses as name specifies works fro keeping the entire computer system safe from the unauthenticated modules and infected snippets.

How it works
Developers and programmer have developed many new anti virus software that can be updated regularly to provide the better security but the functioning of the typical anti virus would remain the same in spite of high advancements. Once installed in your system it handles and supervises the entire security of the data and file system. it works excellently with the presence of firewall. Here is work description of typical anti virus software.

Information gathering
After the installation anti virus first gets the information of the entire system in order to trace the virus definition. Many latest anti virus software for automatically starts getting information from the internal directories after the installation but this factor is present in advanced anti viruses only. This process is varies with the product. Efficiency and accuracy of the anti virus software depends on their quality and features. They are also able to provide the periodic information to the computer user by prompting the reading of threat. Information gathering is the first step that anti virus performs when it gets install in the system.

Scanning
The second task of the anti virus is the scanning of the entire disk directory and partitions of the computer system to check the security level and presence of infection in the secondary data storage device. There are many anti virus soft wares that are available. It’s totally the choice of the user to manually or automatically proceed with the scanning process. Both of the selections work equally perfectly in scanning and detecting the corrupt and uneven files form the system after the information gathering. Anti virus soft wares comes in CDs and DVD also and you can also download them through the internet. manual scan has the advantage that it prompts the threats from the external sources at the time of file open, all emails and computer downloads are also checked time to time with the help of manual scan.

Deletion/Cleaning
After the complete san of the system all the anti virus usually prompt or create a list of infections that are found in the system. But this process also has many steps involved in it.

First it detects the location of the virus and extracts the complete address for prompting the alert box to the computer user, to aware him with the presence of infection. This is done by alert box, flash box or unknown file detection.
After that user is responsible for the next action .some antivirus automatically leans or delete the suspicious files form the memory of computer to prevent the loss of data in time. Some anti viruses does not allow this feature. they are dependent on the decisions of the computer users that the want to clean or remove the file

How to select the anti virus for your computer
You must choose the bets anti virus software for your computer for the safety of your system. There are many effective ways to select anti virus some of them are listed below

Always choose the anti virus with good safety features..
Periodic updating for the software must be provided.
Try to find the product that also detects the unsignatured files from the system too.

You can also consult your Internet Service Providers to better know that which anti virus is suitable for your system. Some of the examples of latest anti virus software are NOD 32, Symantec , Avira ETC.