Best of the Free Anti-virus Choices?

iamjoltman writes "I've been looking to replace the McAfee anti-virus on my parent's XP machine. So, I've been looking at the three free anti-virus choices, AVG Free Edition, avast! Home Edition and AntiVir Personal Edition. I know there are other options, but I believe any others are only on-demand scanners, and that's not an option. So, what does the Slashdot crowd think is the best of these choices? Keep in mind, I'm only looking in anti-virus, I'll go elsewhere for firewall or malware protection."

Comments

AVG here..

[the_rajah]

I've been using the free (as in gratis) version of AVG on all the Windows computers in the family for a long time and have been very pleased with the results.. No successful virus attacks in 9 computers over a period of at least 3 years. The hard part, and this is not specific to AVG, is getting the family members who still use dialup to stay current with updates since some of the downloads take quite a while.

I can't comment on the other free antivirus programs as I've not tried them.

Avast vs AVG

[Alien54]

Avast has an excellent feature that nobody else has, which is the ability to scan in command line mode on reboot before major services load, similar to running chkdsk. This enables you to kill a lot of things that fire up as a wndows service. They get a gold star for this.

AVAST also has plugins for about a dozen IM and p2p services. This is excellent for a number of reasons.

On the other hand, the free version does not seem to have a scheduled scan feature, not that I've noticed.

AVG is more user friendly, does have a scheduled scan feature that Avast does not seem to have. It does not seem to have a plugin for IM and p2p networks.

Go with Antivir

[Deathlizard]

A while back, I did some testing of my own using the three above scanners. The test was done using a virtual PC VM that could be rolled back and reset, that way all three were tested with an exact PC image and system. Then they were subjected to an IE attack from a known malicious site (which I wont mention since I don't want you infecting your PC)

AVG was dead last, and could not stop even simple web attacks from propagating, even with the highest settings, although it was the least intrusive and fastest of the three, and didn't nag you to upgrade or anything.

Second was Avast. it stopped a lot of the malicious code, but some still got through and started to drop spyware into the system. It supposedly has guards similar to Windows defender, but didn't seem to do anything to stop the unknown propagations from occurring even on maximum settings.

Antivir was the best out of the three, catching most of the viruses at it's default setting, and all of the malware at it's maximum (it has definitions for questionable programs like VNC, Jokes and the like, but it's turned off by default) It's biggest problem is that it is the naggiest AV of the three, which constantly asking you to upgrade to the paid version. It also has a tendency to be very sensitive to programs that do virus like behavior at maximum settings, so expect some false positives from time to time.

PCMag Did This Review

[lseltzer]

PCMag looked at these three last September.

Most new computers come bundled with a free antivirus solution, but sooner or later you have to start paying to get the latest virus-definition updates. When the subscription lapses, your protection evaporates. Don't let that happen! If you don't have the funds or inclination to maintain a subscription, try a free antivirus utility. We looked at three that provide full system scanning and also scan all files on access. (Two others, BitDefender 8 Free Edition and ClamWin Free Antivirus 0.86.2, were omitted, because they lack real-time scanning.)

Re:RTFSummary

[erktrek]

You can use WinPooch in combination with ClamWin to allow for active scanning type goodness.
Cheers,
E.