People ask me all the time which is the best antivirus program for their Microsoft Windows computer.

This is probably the hardest question to answer, as there is no one shoe fits all strategy here. There is a clear difference in what anti-viruses corporate businesses should use who host web sites, servers and data sets.

But when it comes to the basic home computer or business machine the answers I give people doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the computer security sector.

I see computers with Viruses everyday

Every day of the week I see computers with viruses on them. Some have viruses spying on them in the form of Spyware, others have Adware (seeing ads to them) and some even lock the users out of their computers completely, this is called Ransomware.

Some are easy to remove and some are impossible. The antivirus programs on my customers computers are not good enough to stop these viruses nor able to remove them.

Which is the best Antivirus

I honestly can’t tell you which is the best antivirus and this is why:

1) I see different antivirus programs everyday.

Each computer which is infected my customers ask me to help remove has a different antivirus. I see a different antivirus on every computer failing to stop viruses on peoples computers.

This doesn’t mean antivirus applications do not work. I am sure there are millions of people protected by antivirus’s every day. But no antivirus in particular do I not see on an infected computer, I see them all.

2) Different antivirus programs do well at different times.

A quick search in Google will show you different experiments and tests people are doing regarding testing anti-virus programs on different platforms.

You can clearly see at any one time one program is doing better than others. This is great now but again in a few weeks another antivirus program will be performing better than others.

3) Different antivirus programs find different things.

All these different antivirus programs are made by different companies all over the world by different programmers and business people.

There are a lot of ideas going around and they are very closely guarded secrets.

One antivirus company will do things by a certain way to another company resulting in antivirus company A catching viruses company B missus.

What can you do?

Anything is better than nothing, they will all help you.

In my personal experience it all comes down to the user of the computer; where you go, what you open and download and install.

Computers can be replaced, but data can be lossed forever. So always remember to back up.