Spyware and computer viruses are one of the online threats that can be harmful to your system. Protection against these threats is essential and every computer should have at least a basic protection.

National Cyber Security Alliance in 2005 online safety study has reported that 81% of computer home users lack basic protection. This study shows that most people still don’t know about PC protection and even though some of them know about it, they don’t know where to find good software to protect their system.

In this article, I will tell you what are the anti-spyware and anti-viruses that you can use for free and will give you the protection that you need.

Avast! Anti-virus is created by ALWIL Software and one of the top anti-viruses. I like this the most because it has seven protections. Instant messaging, Internet mail, network shield, outlook/exchange, P2P shield, standard shield and web shield.

Another good software is AVG. AVG is created by Grisoft and you can get new virus definitions almost everyday. It also has a real-time protection against viruses. Install one of these software because you cannot have more than one anti-virus in a system.

Now let us go to the anti-spyware solution. The first one is Spybot Search and Destroy and it’s also free software. This software is very good and it can remove almost all threats such as adware, spyware, and keyloggers from your computer. It also has some real-time protection.

Ad-Aware 2007 is also one of my favorite software. The free version of this software lacks Ad-Watch, which is the real-time protection against spyware. However, owning the free version of this software is enough because you can use other software to provide your system a real-time protection for free.

The software that can provide you real-time protection against spyware are Spyware Terminator and Windows Defender. Both are free and both are good enough to give real-time protection for your system.

Anti-spyware has a different rule than anti-viruses, not like anti-viruses, you can install more than one anti-spyware in your system.

It’s up to you which software that you want to use because all the software that I recommend here are good and please remember that some of these free software can only be used for personal use only and not for commercial use.