Strategic insights
Tip: Free Anti-virus for Windows Vista

Windows Vista has been released for public testing (last week). But, none of the major anti-virus companies support the new operating system - yet.

But, there is hope.

Computer Associates has release a Vista compatible version of their eTrust EZ Antivirus, with a free one-year subscription.

I have been using their product for a while, and I like it. The best part is that it does not draw attention to itself. Not like McAfee and Symantec that constantly displays pops-up messages to tell you that it have done what it was supposed to do.

CA's antivirus just protect, updates and does all the things it needs to do without constantly bugging me about it. Nice!

BTW: It is very hard to infect Windows Vista with viruses. Many parts of the system (all the essential areas) cannot be accessed programmatically without a manual approval by the computer administrator. Try for instance to copy a file into the windows install folder - or do anything else outside your "user" folder.

In effect, the only way you can get a virus or any other kind of malicious file into Vista is when you manually accept it. This, of course, does not totally stop the spread of viruses, but it does stop 70% of them (the rest - 30% of all viruses - is spread because the user clicks "OK" in a dialog box - thus installing the damn thing.)

And not only that, but since the acceptance needs to be done in a special "administration mode", that is different from normal types of dialogs, it is likely that this number will drop too.

See Also

• FREE eTrust EZ Antivirus for Windows VistaTM Beta Users
• Protected Mode in Vista IE7