Ask Slashdot: Actual Best-in-Show For Free Anti Virus?

First time accepted submitter paperclipman writes "I'm on the college student budget and want to make sure that my recent investment in an Acer laptop will last me a good long while. I like to think of myself as a reasonably competent CPU user so I'm no adventurous link-clicker, but I do download some music as a recent SoundCloud devotee. My Kaspersky antivirus will be expiring shortly and I don't particularly care to renew with that steep of a fee — any advice from fellow thrifts?"

Comments

Re:Simple

[Erioll]

Not the same thing IMO. A great amount of malware requires that the user does something. So "download our .exe and ignore the security prompts!" is still a very large section of things, and has nothing to do with a secure OS or not. Programs running as a user has as many rights as a user themselves. That's what most virus software is for: detecting that you're trying to run something that's "bad" but it's not exploiting security holes to do so. It's just running with "full trust" just like any other program on your machine, and behaving badly.

College student? Check your benefits

[PPalmgren]

Granted it was ten years ago, but when I went to UNCC, there was a small selection of software provided by the school under a shared license for free to students. This included, in my case, norton corporate, which was not intrusive and did an admirable job. Might wanna check around and see if you have similar options available. While the best free AV might be MSE for Windows, you might be able to get a paid AV for free.

Re:Simple

[hairyfeet]

MSE is good IF, and its a BIG IF, you are not going anywhere risky, as it doesn't seem to do as well on drive bys as the others. This isn't really surprising as it started out as Giant AntiSpy before being bought by MSFT, but if he is going anywhere other than school sites I'd be leery if he isn't tech savvy.

A better choice IMHO and one I've been giving to my customers for a couple of years now is Comodo Antivirus as its butt simple, pretty much install and forget, is free, and is VERY good at stopping malware cold. If you want extra protection it asks on install if you wish to use their secure DNS which blacklists malware sites, but its strictly optional. its light on resources, doesn't pop up 40 ads a week trying to sell you crap like Avast has been doing lately, and has a really nice sandboxing feature that is enabled by default but which you can set to be as granular as you like, anything from off to whitelistsing to blacklisting, really nice.

All in all out of the free AVs I'd rate it "best of show" because not only does it have sane defaults and great sandboxing, but its as simple or as fine grained as you want it to be. With MSE there really isn't any way to change...well anything, with Comodo if you desire you can tweak pretty much everything if you choose, from the behavior of the scanning engine, to the levels of paranoia on the sandboxing (which MSE doesn't do) to who what and when it scans and where it will scan.

Re:You want ad-blocking, not AV

[ozgood]

You don't even need to run an .exe. The RSA hack a while ago was social engineered with an excel exploit. http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002226.html