Familiarizing Yourself with the Parts of an Antivirus Program - The Antivirus Tab

With all the notoriety surrounding the different forms of malware in today's digital world, people have started formulating steps on how to prevent and cure virus infections. These could be in the form of a solid antivirus program, a software firewall, backing up data, or even just avoiding malicious sites and scam e-mails. However, some people just install the antivirus program and let it do its job without interfering. There might be a setting that was not activated that caused the user to lose control of the system and get infected. Here are some of the parts of a typical antivirus program.

The first would be some sort of summary about the program. This would say what parts of the program are turned on and what parts are turned off.

The most important one to know would be the primary part which is the antivirus component. It would seem weird that antivirus programs have several components but as the years progressed more and more features were added both for marketing purposes and for increasing effectiveness. Some of the common topics in the antivirus tab are "Run a Scan", "Upgrade Virus Database", and "Scheduled Scans". Virus scanners have two modes - the background mode and the in-demand mode. While it would be wishful thinking that virus scanners can just scan away every time the computer is on, the truth is that if the computer did that, the computer's memory usage would spike through the roof. Scans often take over thirty minutes provided that the computer only had a hundred gigabytes of hard drive space consumed and if the computer scans always, its performance will definitely decrease.

As for upgrading the virus database, there are thousands of viruses being created every day in the labs and homes of cyber criminal firms and freelance hackers. A computer can be in penetrable today and tomorrow it could be a sitting duck against the multitude of new threats. It is of utmost importance, then, to upgrade the virus database as much as possible and as often as possible. Some antivirus programs do this real-time, which means that every time they create a new patch or new fix to an existing anomaly, the servers automatically send and update each piece of antivirus software that is registered to the company. A quick check of the virus database might actually fluster the user - in it are usually thousands upon thousands of strains of renegade software.

The last part of the antivirus tab would be "Scheduled Scans". This is especially helpful for the system administrators and computer security personnel. Think of a workplace that consists of computers ranging into the hundreds and thousands. It would take an entire day or even more to manually set these computers to scan themselves for basic maintenance and ground keeping. With the Scheduled Scan option, they simply have to enter the data once and voila! At some predetermined time, the computer will immediately update its database and scan the computer for malware.