ClamWin Free Antivirus is a free, open-source antivirus program.

Dozens of antivirus programs — Symantec AntiVirus, McAfee Virus Scan, and Kaspersky AntiVirus, to name only a few — have much in common. They all work diligently to intercept the next invasion of computer malware. And annually they all wring as much money as they can out of users in exchange for their services.

You can get protection from viruses without paying a penny. Turn to ClamWin Free Antivirus, an oddly named program that adheres to the Gnu open-source model. It won't charge you anything for virus protection — not now, not a year from now.

What do you get for nothing? ClamWin Free Antivirus is a program that, in its latest version, works in Vista as well as in XP, scanning your files for the fingerprints of viruses and spyware identified by a virus database that is updated several times a day.

You may schedule or launch scans at your whim. A right-click menu choice provides more-selective scans of specific files or folders. ClamWin Free Antivirus also offers integration with Microsoft Outlook for inspecting message attachments that could be carrying dangerous code.

What don't you get? ClamWin Free Antivirus does not yet automatically inspect files as you open them. If you download the latest whiz-bang plaything from the internet, better check it with ClamWin Free Antivirus before you open it. That's not a bad trade-off for a free malware checker. Since no single antivirus tool is perfect, you should always use more than one such program anyway. Why pay for them all?