Page 1 of Best Anti-Virus (preferably free one)

its another one of those threads that crops up now and again sorry. I used to have Avast on my laptop but noticed this has gotten sluggish and I`m not that confident its working. Does anyone have any alternatives?

I`m still happy with avast, I use that on this PC when I`m in XP for playing games
I use comodo on my PII 450
MSE on the laptop.

I`ve started using Microsoft SE in the belief that it`s a bit less bloaty than the other usual suspects.

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/support.aspx?mkt=en-us

Avira AntiVir for me
http://www.free-av.com/

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Another vote for MSE.  I`ve used all the usual paid-for suspects in the past and none of them seemed to work as well as MSE.

J Mark Oates

I had been using Avast and Avira for years, but had noticed they both slowly got sluggish, so since i got my new Windows 7 PC, I`ve also switched to Microsoft Security Essentials, which seems to run very smoothly.

I`m still running AVG on my main PC and it does as good a job as anything I`ve used, but I have installed the latest corporate version of F-Secure on the laptop. The old versions of F-Secure were terrible, but the new one is very lightweight by comparison and got favourable ratings in the AV prog showdowns. AVG has decent enough detection rates and is very easy on resources, which is why I stick with it.

I`ve tried Avast, Avira, Comodo and others, but never got on with them. I toyed with the idea of using Panda because it`s lightweight and has very good real-time and on-demand detection rates, but as it`s basically Cloud software you can`t customise it as much as I`d like.

Every AV program will miss some stuff, and will also give the occasional false positive, so I tend to check suspect files with this online service, which uses multiple scanning engines:

http://virscan.org/

Of course all of the above probably changed with the introduction of the new products for 2011!

This item was edited on Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 16:57

Microsoft Security Essentials. Don`t know it`s there haven`t had any problems and see no reason to change.
I would recommend the occasional sweep with Malwarebytes as well though.

Snaps

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MSSE with malwarebytes and unhackme/regrun on standby

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I tried Avira with my desktop & it let on a load of viruses, so now I have gone back to AVG.