You took your time to research which among the existing antivirus software around best suit your computer and your usage. You took time to ask technologically savvy friends and relatives and you even visited some well known tech-related forums to get unbiased information about antivirus.
When you finally chose one antivirus program, you ordered your program online or you went to the local computer shop near your area. You install it on your computer and you leave it on working on the background while you do your usual stuff on your PC. You feel you have done your very best to protect your computer from those menacing viruses, Trojan horses, worms and malwares.
So you became tremendously disappointed when your computer suddenly crashes and you just realized it was infected by a virus and the virus basically wiped out your entire hard drive, taking with it your 1st year old baby's video on his first foot steps and that presentation for that client you were eyeing to bag, a presentation you've been working on since last month.
You try to consider where you went wrong. You feel you have bought the best of the best in terms of antivirus programs and you know you have turned it on for the past few days. What went wrong? Well, quite frankly, you just forgot the one thing that you should not have forgotten above anything else.
Antivirus update.
Once you have purchased an antivirus program, you have to make sure you do an antivirus update as often as you can, maybe even daily so what you may want to do is to put the antivirus update setting of your program in automatic. Some programs have their antivirus update settings turned on but some softwares are placed on manual mode so you may want to check your program's user manual just to make sure.
But why is an antivirus update important?
Initially, your antivirus program has set definitions for all sorts of worms, viruses, malwares, Trojan horses, bugs and other uninvited softwares. However, due to man's innovation (or sometimes boredom), new viruses and worms are introduced in a basis so frequent that your antivirus program needs an antivirus update to make sure it is up to date to the definitions of new viruses and worms.
Once your program is updated with the latest antivirus updates, then your computer is virtually safe from the latest line of computer bugs and traps. True there are some programs that have sophisticated intelligence that even if the virus is not defined in their knowledge, so long as it behaves in a "virus-like" manner, it is dinged and may be up for deletion, cleaning or is deemed for vault placing, depending on the action you would command it to do. However, this occurs in a very shot-in-the-dark manner as you can only hope that the new virus will behave like virus before it. Doing an antivirus update will make you very sure that you and your program are very much prepared for all those viruses and worms.