Best free antivirus?

Chris_Nowak

I've been using AVG for years but am wondering, given the debate about the latest version, whether I ought to switch.

Am running Vista Basic. Any suggestions?

thebaldwindowfitter

another vote for avast

gaming_guy

i would have to give my vote to antivir

GunJack

moved to avast from avg - nice, unobtrusive, no problems yet. It also includes an e-mail scanner which I don't believe antivir does.

Cerenia

I like Avast myself, might try Antivir though

tomsolomon

If you fancy a change from AVG why not try Avira antivirus.

http://www.free-av.com/

Its very good.

Cerenia

I went for Avira yesterday as well - so far only scanned 33% of my HD, and detected 1 virus, and 2 suspicious files which Norton and AVG missed!

superscaper

Cerenia wrote: »

I went for Avira yesterday as well - so far only scanned 33% of my HD, and detected 1 virus, and 2 suspicious files which Norton and AVG missed!

Worth looking into though to make sure it isn't a false positive. I.e. what is the file it found? Could be legitimate. I'm always sceptical of AV apps finding viruses others haven't. It's usually only finding the symtpoms of the virus and/or the file isn't legitimate that I find it is a genuine virus. But plenty of times I've seen it's a genuine file mistakenly picked up. And in fact stops something properly working because the file has been quarantined (hope you haven't deleted it yet). If you're unsure or you know it is a false positive then it's also a good idea to submit it to the AV company to ensure the next updates take account of it.

Cerenia

superscaper wrote: »

Worth looking into though to make sure it isn't a false positive. I.e. what is the file it found? Could be legitimate. I'm always sceptical of AV apps finding viruses others haven't. It's usually only finding the symtpoms of the virus and/or the file isn't legitimate that I find it is a genuine virus. But plenty of times I've seen it's a genuine file mistakenly picked up. And in fact stops something properly working because the file has been quarantined (hope you haven't deleted it yet). If you're unsure or you know it is a false positive then it's also a good idea to submit it to the AV company to ensure the next updates take account of it.

In the end, it came up as 7 viruses - 2 of them were a virus from a download I did which Norton picked up as well, a backdoor trojan. The others were in temp net files, and my other half's login area, all with suspect names, and he never uses this PC anyway, but there's 1 file, an .exe with a odd name that was in the system restore, kept files in quarantine though to be safe in case.

pottsy_79

I have Avast on all my pc's and not had any virus problems - frequent updates too.
Works as well with Vista as with XP and I recommend it to anyone that asks me

gaming_guy

GunJack wrote: »

moved to avast from avg - nice, unobtrusive, no problems yet. It also includes an e-mail scanner which I don't believe antivir does.

it does scan emails - but just in a different way to avg as antivir scans the email files on the hdd after they have been downloaded