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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 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.
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
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?
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.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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.