reliable free anti virus

Grumpysally

I need to get some anti virus on my daughters laptop asap.Ive just discovered that shes been running it without, as the Macafee that was on had expired months ago. It's two weeks till payday so I cant afford to buy anything till then.
Any recomendations.
Thanks

heatherw_01

AVG
http://free.grisoft.com/

There have been other threads similar to this in the past.

EDIT: nickmack found the link

nickmack

This topic has been discussed recently, please refer to the following:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=227778

If you still have questions, come back to this thread and we'll see what we can do.

Browntoa

yep , stick with AVG free

save your money

Grumpysally

'AVG Anti-Virus Free and ewido anti-spyware Free is for private, non-commercial, single home computer use only.'
Does that mean you can only have it running on one machine in your home?
Might be a dumb question, please be kind.

Aiadi

You can use it on however many machines you want provided that you are not making any profits or selling it to others.

Donnie

My preference is for Avast, as it actually detects viruses.

I had an older version of AVG, which wasn't up to much.

http://www.avast.com/

http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html

oldwiring

If you want perfection you won't get it, but IMVHO both Avast and AVG are good.

saubryn

AVG has improved a lot recently, I tried it for a friends machine when helping them out, and it is doing a good job of keeping their machines clean. It updates very frequently with new definitions. Sometimes it doesn't remove the virus totally if they do get infected, but I've had similar issues with Norton not cleaning up perfectly too, so you can't really complain.

Rev

I can second avast, used it for years and never had a problem.

John_Gray

If a virus corrupts a (usually executable) file by changing its contents and/or adding code to it, then it will be virtually impossible to return the file to its original state without completely replacing it by a clean copy. The antivirus program might not know what the original file contained, nor be able to get a copy of it from anywhere. That's why Windows XP checks (many of) the system files and can replace them from a backup location if the original gets modified or deleted (by accident or design).

Antivirus programs do a pretty good job in preventing viruses from running, but they can't always restore things to the exact state that applied before the virus struck!

John