Best free security upgrades for your PC

These programs will lessen your fear of malware and of being tracked by search engines.

Avast Free Antivirus is “the most well-rounded free antivirus program out there” and detects about 95 percent of malware. You can pay for programs that will beat that benchmark, but this was “the only free product we looked at that didn’t falsely identify a single safe file as a piece of malware.”

TrackMeNot.org offers a Firefox and Chrome add-on that prevents Yahoo, Google, and other search engines from creating a profile of you. TrackMeNot “inundates the engines with a blizzard of search items” so that your own searches get lost in the noise.

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