A very simple way of selecting an anti-virus product is via references from friends, colleagues or reading reviews on download websites. But will this help us select a perfect product for our needs?

Choosing an antivirus for home or office use has always been quite a difficult task for many of us. A very simple way of selecting an anti-virus product is via references from friends, colleagues or reading reviews on download websites. But will this help us select a perfect product for our needs?

There are also a few more criteria by which I choose a proper anti-virus product.
First of all, I suggest starting to make a shortlist of some of the best known AV products on the market. Next, I scout for independent reports produced by anti-virus testers of all over the world. There reports ususally include a comparison between the tested products with an emphasis on the pluses and the minuses when it comes to eliminating different malware threats. Such a report can be found here  or here.

After comparing the anti-virus products, we can start installing some of them in order to see how well they cope with our system and how easy it is to be configured. For example, ZoneAlarm products use a lot of resources so you'll need a powerfull machine. Note: it is strongly recommended that we never  try to install two or more anti-virus products on a computer due to the serios conflicts that can appear. So, we neeed to install a product at the time, un-install it and so on, in case we wish to test several AV solutions.

Last, we can test the antivirus products ourselves using the test files found on eicar.com and  checkvir.com. In conclusion, if we want to make the perfect selection of an anti-virus product, it's reasonable to take into consideration any of the above mentioned criteria.