We have received a very good question from one of our visitors. Sheila was wonderings how important it really is to have your virus protection program updated.

A growing number of computers today is connected to the Internet all the time – you pay a fixed monthly fee and you can be connected 24/7. Why am I writing this? To show you that there is really no excuse not to update your free virus protection daily.

All (and I really mean all) free virus protection programs can automatically update themselves through the Internet. When you install them they usually ask you to update them and most of them have updating schedule turned on by default. The vast majority of them automatically checks for updates once a day, if there is something to update they download it and run the update. In more than 90% of cases you are not even aware of the fact that this happened because the antivirus does not need any of your input. Maybe two to three times a year you have to reboot your computer to finish the update and that’s it.

Now, if this is not a big deal, is it even necessary to do the updates?

Yes. It is extremely important to do regular updates. During testing various free virus protection programs it was determined that some of them find almost 50% less viruses when they are not regularly updated. This is a huge number and I can’t stress enough how important this is.

When you install new free virus protection program make sure it is set for regular updates. If you are not sure, if you have done that on your computer, check it right now. It’s very little work but your free virus protection program will serve you much better this way.