Best free anti virus

[Rodent-Boy]

WOuld a change of OS actually void a warranty?

 

[ponder]

MSE doesnt want to install. Should I uninstall Norton first?

Norton is a festering pile of sheet. I battled with that biatch two weeks ago.

Go for Avira.

 

[DJNgoma]

WOuld a change of OS actually void a warranty?

No.

 

[Yucca]

No.

To add to that,.. in general the ONLY tings that can void warantees are bios upgrades, incorrect firmware flashing and alteration of CERTAIN hardware components. Warantees are more about the hardware than the software (with the exception of viruses).

 

[chickenbeef]

Avast gets my vote.

 

[kaisterkai]

You know after hearing from other people.. I tried MSE.. and it ended up to be rather good... actually great.. AVG.. yes it good, but it gave me errors with I tried to update the program..

 

[Yucca]

People seem very concerned over AV software yet the safest option to do even on windows is run a Linux guest in virtualbox. Use this guest for downloading if you must.

The major danger out there is spyware and given that you can get spyware doctor for free with google pack, that should not be a problem. More of a problem is the fact that people don't follow correct procedures when being infected with spyware. it is not good enough to just remove the spyware. You MUST change all valuable passwords to online accounts..

 

[Tpex]

AVG + Threatfire and antimalwarebytes for spyware

 

[realbigdreamer]

I personally don't believe that there is something as "the best anti-virus". Yes, there are a few bad ones, but how would you say one is the best? If it does the job right, then it's good.

 

[CallaB]

I got a cracked eset. Problem solved.

 

[kaisterkai]

Yes i used to have Eset as well... but then it expired... to bad couldn't find the crack for it anymore.. so just went to MSE.. because people said it was worth a try... and guess what? there were many viruses that Eset didn't pick up that MSE did.. and I was surprise, because I used it for so long...

Oh well I guess personal opinion does matter in this case...

 

[Vaaljapie]

1. Antivir
2. AVG

 

[double_n]

I've been using AVG for a while now (before that I used Norton - wow that was crappy). Will be trying out MSE as AVG is not so wonderful either.

 

[stevovo]

Just a quick question: has anybody that used avast and mse noticed whether there is a speed difference between them?

I used to use avast but I formatted the other day and I'm thinking of giving mse a try.

 

[Vimage]

Yup. General consensus. AVG!

 

[Robin Hood]

You might need to go to the Symantec Website and grab their uninstall tool as it nearly always does not uninstall clean using Windows uninstall. The resolve to never install a crappy Norton product ever again. They don't even know how to create a proper uninstall routine.

very true...and this was their prob for the past 10+ years now...

 

[kaisterkai]

Just a quick question: has anybody that used avast and mse noticed whether there is a speed difference between them?

I used to use avast but I formatted the other day and I'm thinking of giving mse a try.

I tried using Avast, when I start up my computer, it takes Long.. but MSE doesn't slow down anything at the start up...

Well scanning.. can't really tell I mean.. different folders have different spaces so.. don't know...

 

[Random717]

Just a quick question: has anybody that used avast and mse noticed whether there is a speed difference between them?

I used to use avast but I formatted the other day and I'm thinking of giving mse a try.

I tested this today. Installed Security Essentials and did a system scan, then uninstalled and tried the latest Avast (Version5, recently released ) and did a scan. Both took less than 5 minutes. I was watching CPU usage, MSE used higher CPU during the scan (10-15%), but only seemed to use one thread. Apparently Avast supports multithreading, which might explain how it didn't really go above 6% CPU, averaged 3%... that and claimed optimization for Core i7.

Another thing, did a minimal Avast install, so just real time file system protection. 2 processes in memory using a total of 6.5 MB of RAM (maximum 20MB during the scan!). Forgot to check MSE, but from the past few months I recall it using around 25MB when not scanning?
This is on a x64 Win 7 system.

On XP I've noticed that MSE can triple the shutdown time...

Proper 'scientific' testing results can be found here:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/performance/performance_dec09.pdf

 

[stevovo]

Is "MsMpEng.exe" part of MSE

Task manager shows that process as using 67 188 K of memory on my xp x86 pro

I'm fairly certain that avast never used so much resources.

Still... it seems faster though, dunno how but it does.

In my process explorer it shows that process with description:"AntiMalware Service Executable" and company name is:"Microsoft Corporation" so I'm guessing that it is MSE.

 

[SirFooK'nG]

AVG needs to die in a fire,Microsoft Security Essentials has taken the free antivirus throne

+1