PC Audio 102

For many years I kept my audio PC away from the Internet and all its dangers. Indeed, my previous computer ended up with a triple-booting Windows XP setup, so each time I switched it on I could choose from its General Purpose Internet-enabled partition running a virus checker, firewall and the rest, an entirely separate and very stripped-down Music partition, or a Review partition on which I installed software that might only be in place for a matter of days before being deleted. This arrangement worked well, since if I ever caught anything nasty via the Internet it never affected my audio software on its hidden Music partition, and the review install was a wonderful test bench for trying out loads of new software without any long-term worries.

However, I found myself needing to be online more and more often, and began to miss the social and business advantages of being able to receive emails and Skype messages even when I was making music. So, on my latest PC I simply put everything into a single Windows installation that remains permanently connected to the Internet, the only tricky thing being to make sure my PC would remain safe while online, without having its performance degraded in any way. In an ideal world a malware utility would intercept incoming viruses, spyware, adware, scareware and any other malicious software while maintaining a miniscule footprint (i.e. consume very little RAM and very few CPU cycles at any time it is running).

In practice, some are better than others in this respect — some besiege the user with pop-ups and nag them to download and run updates on a regular basis, and some may even on occasion grab sufficient system resources to produce audio clicks and pops during an otherwise perfect recording. The simplest solution for any Windows user is to use what comes with the operating system. I installed Microsoft Security Essentials along with Windows 7 18 months ago and haven’t experienced any virus-related problems since, and I know plenty of other musicians have done the same and not lived to regret their decision. MSE may not be the most thorough virus checker around, yet it should prove perfectly adequate for a host of people (especially if you don’t visit dodgy web sites!), is completely free, unobtrusive, and has a minimal footprint that shouldn’t interfere with audio performance.

If you’d feel happier with a slightly more thorough but still free malware utility, I would personally recommend Avast! Free Antivirus (www.avast.com/en-au/index), or BitDefender Antivirus Free Edition (www.bitdefender.com.au), both of which should perform their tasks with a minimum of fuss and interruptions. AviraFree Antivirus, while effective, does have a reputation for impacting performance a little more than some of its competitors, as does Kaspersky Anti-Virus, and AVG AntiVirus Free 2014 is somewhat too keen to advertise their more sophisticated paid products at every opportunity. For musicians who want the added security of a paid utility that offers global support in a host of different languages, I would recommend ESET NOD32 Antivirus (www.eset.com/au), as it also has the reputation of being particularly compact and lightweight on system resources.

It’s simply not worth running the risk of doing without malware protection at any time, so whichever utility you decide to install, always leave its real-time protection option activated so that any incoming files from any source are automatically checked in the background as they arrive. After all, infections may also arrive from unexpected sources such as USB sticks and external audio/backup drives plugged in by friends, family or studio clients!

If you’ve got a good memory and organisational skills, you could rely on this real-time protection running in the background, disable the deeper ‘scheduled’ scans (normally found on the Settings page) altogether to avoid any possibility of audio clicks and pops occurring during vital recordings, but manually run the deeper virus checker scan once every few days when it’s most convenient. Or you could leave Scheduling enabled, but make sure it’s set to perform only a quick scan of the most important files, adjust the start time of this to when you’re highly unlikely to be making music, and tick any available options that skip the scan if you nevertheless happen to be actively ‘using’ your PC at that time. It’s also wise to perform a more thorough deep scan once every couple of weeks across all of your internal hard drives (along with any USB sticks and external hard drives) to catch any infected files in more obscure locations.

Sadly, no single virus checker will catch 100% of all virus activity (especially since new strains are being released on an almost daily basis), so whichever utility you choose, it’s wise to run another on-demand scanner occasionally to intercept any thugs that have broken through your outer defences yet remain undetected. It’s normally a bad idea to install two background virus checkers on the same PC, as they are likely to regard each other as a virus needing to be destroyed, with unpredictable results. However, a few are specifically designed to run on demand (without installation) alongside an existing checker to give you this extra layer of security. I can recommend Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware Free (www.malwarebytes.org) for this purpose, along with the wonderfully-named EEK (Emisoft Emergency Kit, from www.emsisoft.com), both free for personal use, and which on occasion have picked up a suspect file missed by my main virus checker.

Some malware utilities, in addition to scanning for matches in their regularly-updated database of offenders, employ ‘heuristic’ techniques to flag as a threat any file that they deem to be acting suspiciously. Essentially they are making educated guesses, so you can’t always believe them. The safest approach if you’re not sure is to ‘quarantine’ the flagged file so it can’t do any damage, and then either check with its developer about false positives, or see if any of your audio applications subsequently complain that something is missing, whereupon you can return it to active duty. Finally, if one of your checker utilities does find something nasty in the woodshed, but can’t for some reason remove it unaided, pay a visit to www.malwareexperts.com or www.rescuemybrowser.com, as they may offer specific step-by-step instructions. Stay safe!