Learning Zone

Hi Matthew,

Vista has a built-in firewall but doesn’t have any virus protection, spyware protection or a pop-up blocker. You need to add those yourself in order to keep your PC safe.

Virgin Media’s free PC Guard software is by Kaspersky, one of the major antivirus companies, and it works with both Windows XP and Vista. The system requirements for PC Guard are listed here: http://www.virginmedia.com/help/internetsecurity/pcguard-system-requirements.php

I haven’t tried it myself, but I did a Google search for “virgin pc guard review”, got over 80,000 results and after browsing through a few of them, found that a lot of people had reported problems with it. There were many saying that it slowed the PC down, that it needed the PC to be rebooted after an update and that it had caused problems with their wireless networking.

A free antivirus alternative is AVG, which can be downloaded from http://free.avg.com/ and is well-regarded by many users, including me. Other free alternatives are Avira (http://www.free-av.com/) and Avast (http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html).

If your new PC comes with an antivirus package already installed (many come with a trial version of Norton or McAfee), you would need to uninstall it first if you wanted to install another AV product. Generally speaking, having more than one AV scanner installed at a time is a bad idea and can slow the PC to a crawl.