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What Free Antivirus Do You Install On Windows?

Posted by timothy on from the is-clamav-no-longer-good? dept.

Techman83 writes "After years of changing between AVG Free + Avast, it's coming time to find a new free alternative for friends/relatives who run Windows. AVG and Avast have been quite good, but are starting to bloat out in size, and also becoming very misleading. Avast recently auto updated from 4.8 to 5 and now requires you to register (even for the free version) and both are making it harder to actually find the free version. Is this the end of reasonable free antivirus, or is there another product I can entrust to keep the 'my computer's doing weird things' calls to a minimum?"

5 of 896 comments (clear)

  1. Registration isn't new by MisterBuggie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Obviously you've never actually used Avast. You've always had to register for the free version, and renew the regsitration once a year. They're giving it away for free, I honestly don't see registering as a big deal.

    And the new version is actually a lot better, it finally detects rootkits... If you're looking for something that actually does its job and yet doesn't take up any space or processing power, I doubt you'll find anything...

    If you're gonna pay for your operating system, and then complain about free antiviruses, you might want to consider changing to linux...

  2. Re:Microsoft Security Essentials by verbalcontract · · Score: 5, Informative

    I respectfully disagree with your notion that Kaspersky is better than MSE. I had Kaspersky's basic anti-virus for 2 years before MSE came out, and it was a terrible resource hog. And not just during scans; the actual real-time protection would increase the time to open a video file from ~2 seconds after double-clicking to ~15 seconds.

    Additionally, when it detects a suspicious file, the program issues the most gut-wrenching squealing noise I've ever heard. And it does this by default; you have to go into settings to disable the noise.

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  3. Ars technica review of MSE by igomaniac · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/first-look-microsoft-security-essentials-impresses.ars

    An in-depth look at Microsoft Security Essentials, it made me decide to try it out on my girlfriend's laptop (I run OS X myself) and it's worked great.

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  4. Re:Smaller AV programs? by EkriirkE · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't think he was talking about the database size, but the fact that both AVG and Avast (I use both) have moved to highly customized skinned UIs and have completely removed any native UI components and include useless junk that slows your system (eg safesearch/linkscanner) in their installers that makes "Custom install" the only practical method

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  5. Re:Uh...Avast? by Enderandrew · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think it was a CNET comparison I read of 19 products. Microsoft Security Essentials was something like 2nd out of 19 products in detection, it was the only free product at the top, and it has the smallest footprint out of all 19 tested.

    You'd be hard pressed to argue there is a better free product right now.

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