I bought a new computer about a month ago (for which thanks to everyone who advised me) – so the month’s free Norton is about to expire. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to buy Norton – what’s the best anti-virus these days? Are there any free ones that are worthwhile?
Thanks,
twicks
On different computers, I use Avast and Avira antivirus. I’ve also used AVG in the past. They are all supposed to be very good. The computers have never gotten infected by something that got past them.
Microsoft Security Essentials is the free AV I recommend to friends and family these days. It’s better, really, than any of the ones you have to pay for, provided you don’t have to deploy one configuration on dozens of machines. Prior to this, it was Avast, and before that, AVG.
I’ve gone the same route as Borghunter – began with AVG, until it started doing scans that tied up my PC for 15 minutes, tried Avast!, which also tended to runs scans at inopportune times, and recently switched to the free Microsoft Defender.
Second on Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s simple to use and it doesn’t clog up your machine while it’s running a scan.
It’s blocked the few threats that tried to get through and the last two scans came up clean.
I also run Malwares Anti-Malware and SUPERantiSpyware.
Nothing catches everything so it’s best to have more than one program.
Do not run more than one antivirus at one time, they tend to conflict with each other.
Not for me. I recently tried it and it slowed the machine to a crawl and then some. Even when not doing a scan. Had to delete it entirely to get the machine back to functional.
This is a big problem with almost all malware programs. Why they are written to hog cycles over everything else is beyond me. I never run any AV program resident in the background because of this. Which is not something I really want to do otherwise.
I am a big fan of Malwarebytes. I run Hijackthis several times a week, not just to catch true malware but to keep an eye on the cruft regular programs keep trying to add in at boot time…