Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
I’m often asked if free antivirus apps are as effective at protecting a Windows PC from virus infections as their “paid” counterparts.
And I must say, that’s an excellent question.
Back in the early days of home computing my answer would have been a huge NO because the free antivirus programs available at the time were indeed inferior to the commercial programs.
But that has changed over the years…
Question from Deidre: I have a Smart TV and my mom told me she heard on the news that viruses can infect smart TVs and we need to run virus scans on them.
I didn’t even know a TV could catch a virus.
Is that true? And how do I run a virus scan if it is? [Read more…]
Question from Dagan: I’ve been using Norton 360 for years, but it recently let a bunch of viruses slip through and get installed on my computer.
Norton removes a bunch of viruses every time I run it but they just keep coming right back.
I want to ditch Norton and install a different antivirus app but I know you’re only supposed to run one antivirus app at a time.
The problem I’m having is I can’t seem to get all the Norton 360 files uninstalled so that I can install Malwarebytes. The Windows thingy that uninstalls programs gets rid of some of the Norton files but some of them come right back when I reboot the computer.
How can I completely uninstall ALL the Norton files from my hard drive? [Read more…]
Regular readers of this blog know I’m a huge fan of free software because I routinely recommend the use of freeware whenever possible to accomplish whatever the task at hand may be.
But as you probably also know there can be hidden dangers lurking behind the scenes every time you install a piece of free software.
The dangers range all the way from the installation of unwanted add-on software to installing viruses and other forms of malware right along with the programs themselves.
Question from Pete: Every now and then I open the Task Manager on my Windows 11 laptop and quickly scan the running processes just to make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary running.
I hopped out of bed this morning, turned on my laptop and did one of those checks. I was surprised to see there were numerous lsass.exe processes running when there’s usually only one. [Read more…]