How to Get The Best Out of Your Anti-Virus

Sure, having an anti-virus is very important, these days, but what's even more important is making sure it works properly! What good is it to have a security software installed if you can't get the best out of it? And what I'm going to say in the following paragraphs is not something hard to accomplish, so please read on.

One thing would be to keep it up-to-date, but I guess you already knew that. But what might have eluded you is the fact that the state of your files might influence the way your anti-virus works. Don't be surprised, this is very normal. Just let me explain. Your AV scans the files. Files are stored on your hardware. Those are basics. But the thing is that your drive might be fragmented, fact which means that your files are fragmented. One file could be scattered into many, many pieces so instead of your Av scanning one huge chunk of info, it has to go and find and scan all these little parts. And you don't have just one file on your PC, do you?

Just think about it, these days hard-drives' capacity is larger and larger and so are the files. A fragmented disk makes it a lot harder for your anti-virus to work properly. Some will go slower and some will eat up more resources to maintain speed. In any case, this is not too good.

Some of you say that they only scan their PCs once a week and leave the computer unattended while the anti-virus does its job so they don't care how much it takes, so you guys can suit yourselves if you don't care. Some anti-viruses (like NOD32) for example have automated scanning processes and scan your files ALL the time, without you even knowing it. This is very efficient to stay protected against threats and it is even better if you keep your disk defragmented. So just do it!