You hear all of the time about the different malware that is out there, ready to pounce on any unsuspecting person surfing the internet. There are of course, lots of malware out there that will cause your system damage. But, you do not need to be paranoid while you are surfing the internet. A little bit of knowledge will go a long way in helping to make sure that your Windows 7 system is secured, whenever you decide to go online. But as you look through the many different anti virus options that are available to you, you have to make a decision on which one will have all of the features that you need to surf safely. People make the mistake and think that all anti virus solutions are the same. But they are not, and it pays for you to check out the different options before you make a final decision.

The first thing that you want to consider, is the actual interface of the product. When a company makes an anti virus solution, in an attempt to give the user all of the features that they think that they will need, they make the interface too confusing. So people will ignore it instead of trying to protect their computer properly. Make sure that you look at actual screenshots of the program before you decide to purchase it. Be sure that you can follow what is going on. Even people who are highly technical sometimes do not understand the interfaces of some anti virus programs. If you are not in the computer security industry, they can use terms that will confuse you very quickly.  So make sure that you can follow the directions that they offer you and that the interface is not too confusing.

Another feature that has been offered lately, in a lot of the top anti virus offerings, is the ability to scan a link before you go to it. When you create a search query in Google, there will be a lot of links that pop up. But, you do not know which ones are secured or not. Some of the anti viruses out there will offer a feature that will pre check the link for you. So when you are ready to go to the site, the pre checker will tell you if the site is safe or not. This is a good feature to have because going into a link blind, is never a good ideal. Most of the results that will pop up on Google are sites that you have never visited before, so you do not know yet if you can trust them.

The last feature that your anti virus should have before you purchase it, is an email attachment scanner. Email with attachments are the number one way that a virus spreads across the internet. So if you do not have this feature, you have to make sure that you scan the attachment after you download it. Having an email attachment scanner available with your anti virus solution already, makes it a lot easier to deal with these types of files. Luckily there are a lot of anti virus products that come with this feature.

So, you see what you will need, as far as the features on a modern day anti virus program. Having all of these features will make you much more secured in the long run.