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What Free Antivirus Do You Install On Windows?
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?"
I should think "friends/relatives who run Windows" would be exactly the type to appreciate the convenience of a low-impact reliable AV package, which means they may have to pay a few bucks. It's fine to play FOS yourself or with trivial office or audio stuff, and I do it myself. But I still give ESET a few shekels/year for each windows PC in my house. It just makes sense to me.
.nosig
I used Avast 4.8 for about a month. Then they upgraded to 5.0. Didn't care about the registration, but everything else just irked me to no end. On the other hand, MSE has every advantage you listed, plus no registration, and the updates are gathered through Windows Update, so you don't have yet another service updating itself.
Oh, and the quick scan takes about 3 minutes.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I've been trying this out on my home computers so far and its definitely less resource intensive than previous AV solutions I've used. I haven't gotten infected with anything lately (that I know of) so I don't know how well it handles infections yet.
Actual web page is here and you can read up on it a bit here.
I have heard good things about MSE from several people, but I haven't tried it myself.
At work (a university) the central IT has chosen to license Sophos. It is, well, crap to put it mildly and takes up amazing amounts of resources. So, instead we use Security Essentials on many systems. Works well, it has successfully stopped viruses that users have tried to get. Pretty light on resources over all, not the lightest weight program I've seen but up there.
Best one for free I've seen. Personally ESET NOD32 is my favourite and what I license for home, but if the price requirement is $0, then MSE is what I use.
Well, I can say it alerted me to one attempted drive-by trojan install, isolated the file, and deleted it, all before I did anything to react to the initial notice. First time I've gotten any sort of notice not related to tracking cookies in a few years.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
avast kept popping up ads to buy their stuff.
switched to avira, no popups. similar number of false positives as avast... i saw no difference between them. but really, who knows if they're working.
is there a way to evaluate antivirus software? i mean, after it's 1.) no popups, 2.) not bloaty 3.) easy on the system 4.) convenient to use... how do you know if it actually works?
I mean I could write a system tray app that's a "virus checker". and always tells you your system's ok... haha
anyway, reading around, seemed like avast, avira, and avg were the best free ones. and after running avg and avast, I liked avira. but really, no idea who's the best.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
- I let windows check for updates, but install them manually.
- I mostly download my software from sourceforge / cygwin's mirrors (yes, I'm risking that those could be compromised).
I haven't noticed anything fishy yet, and my WoW account hasn't been hacked in 5 years :-)
Microsoft Security Essentials. It's really the only choice imo. All the others are trying to sell you something. Now, if you're willing to pay, there are perhaps better choices. The most important thing to remember is to not take it too awful seriously. All AV sucks, badly. It's reactive and it only detects a small percentage of the naughty things. It's the only option, but it sucks. MSSE is good.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Between my job, some side work and friends and family I manage close to 70 Windows machines. I have been doing IT since 1992.
When I am asked this question my answer is always this. None. I think antivirus is more trouble than it is worth. First any new viruses will be undetected, second the pain of actually running anti virus outweighs any marginal benefit received from it.
Of course this answer immediately creates a follow up question... Well then what do you do?
The best way to protect yourself is to run as NON - ADMIN. That's it. A coworker recently got a virus and I simply logged in as admin and ran a free online virus scan. It found his problem and removed it.
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If you are running Windows, you are already implicitly agreeing to trust MS, so why not trust their AV program? It's free and integrates unobtrusively into your system. It seems like the most sensible free choice.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Just because you can't be 100% safe with any given product is no reason to abandon it entirely.
I recently reinstalled Windows, and while I've historically used Avast, I opted to go with nothing this time around. I'm tired of resource usage and slower load times for everything thanks to antivirus; I've moved my e-mail to Google Apps, so they scan my e-mails for viruses. My use of Bittorrent is extremely limited (I only have it installed because Star Trek Online's installer is available via torrent), and I never visit the seedier side of the internet. I'm behind a firewall.
Basically I'm not going to get a virus, so I see no reason to run anti-virus software. Rather than "Can't be 100% safe, may as well not use it", my reasoning is "I'm already 99.99999% safe, so why bother".
(Yes, I know it's still technically possible to get a virus. But the chances are extremely slim, given the way I use my computer.)
I could live without an on-access scan (tell your download manager to scan downloaded files), but Clamwin is completely unusable, IMHO, because it uses up much more system memory, and takes 4X as long to scan compared to the more common Free AVs.
If you want real, free antivirus, go with MoonSecure (v2.x), which is GPL, does on-access scanning, and uses the ClamAV database. It does (momentarily) use up a lot of memory, and slow down the system, but only when first starting up, or updating definitions. Other than that, it's no more of a dog than any other free AV. Free for commercial purposes, likely to have definitions available forever, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Were moving 6000 machines to forefront antivirus, which shares the exact same AV engine as Security essentials.
It has more stuff for enterprise updates and deployments and reporting, but it is soo much faster and lighter than others we have looked at.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Yeah but are they really trojans? Or was MSE wrong about those?
FWIW, I don't install AV on my main windows machine. If I do see something suspicious I upload it to: http://www.virustotal.com/
So far I don't think my machine has been infected before. If my machine ever gets zombied, I'd probably notice since 1) I have a crappy internet connection, 2) I'd eventually notice the network traffic on the gateway machine - which is not windows.
Admittedly, keygens are probably among the most likely software to contain a trojan or something. However, that sort of hand-hacked code does quite often throw up false positives. I've quite often found AVG complaining about cygwin executables or scene demos (Which usually have convoluted compressed executables, probably similar to trojans)
-- All your booze are belong to us.
Microsoft Security Essentials is all you need for non-enterprise A/V.
It's free, it's unobtrusive and it works very well. What's more, commercial AV vendors, like Symantec, realise what a threat it is to their business model and have published a lot of FUD about you get what you pay for - however all the benchmarks I've seen have it ranking up there with the best of them.
The only reason to go for a commercial AV package is if you need a management and reporting console to manage a large number of computers.
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No, it's not like that at all. It's like sleeping with the same woman every night while taking the chance that someone has come by and stuck her with a needle she wasn't aware of.
The chances of that happening are extremely slim.
So... the sites I use often. When was the last time Ars Technica or Slashdot was compromised with something spreading a virus? How about Penny-Arcade or xkcd?
I haven't said it isn't possible, I've only said I'm willing to risk the extremely small chance that I'll get a virus.