Best "free" antivirus

50Twuncle

I asked for advice a week ago or so - for the best free on-line antivirus to rid my PC of various infections that had got past my AVG and Malwarebytes protection - I cleaned the nasties using ESET online scanner but am now considering whether to dump AVG (which appears pretty poor) for something else
Hence another question - which free antivirus is considered the current leader ?

KxMx

I changed from AVG to Avast (with MWB alongside) and been quite happy with it.

Remember though no AV is going to stop bugs 100% of the time.

Something that got past AVG and MWB must have been pretty nasty!

JJ_Egan

This forum has multiple recommendations for Avast if you want free .

50Twuncle

KxMx wrote: »

I changed from AVG to Avast (with MWB alongside) and been quite happy with it.

Remember though no AV is going to stop bugs 100% of the time.

Something that got past AVG and MWB must have been pretty nasty!

I am downloading Avast for schools (I work at a school) for free - is there any difference to the "normal" version ?

GunJack

definitions & engine will be the same, it may have a different UI and/or different extras included

esuhl

At the moment, Avast seems to be the best performer (best detection/fix rate) in my personal experience. But it does seem to really slow down the startup time for Windows on *some* machines.

(Do people still use Spybot? I don't know how effective it is these days, but it blocks a lot of malware-related domains in web browsers.)

Norman_Castle

I've been using Panda for a few years on mine and a friends pc. Her pc was previously full of viruses as she opens or downloads anything regardless of how suspicious it may look. Panda has kept her pc safe.
Occasional Panda pop ups in the last few months inviting me to upgrade to the paid version have made me consider moving but these are rare enough to ignore.
http://www.cloudantivirus.com/en/

System

I too have changed from AVG free to Avast, used their free version for a yr then decided to use their paid for version as it was 50% off. You could try YAC (yetanothercleaner) https://www.yac.mx

J_B

esuhl wrote: »

At the moment, Avast seems to be the best performer (best detection/fix rate) in my personal experience.

Any suggestions as to how to remove all its annoying pop ups??

dogmaryxx

http://www.getavast.net/support/disable-pop-ups/

esuhl

esuhl wrote: »

(Do people still use Spybot? I don't know how effective it is these days, but it blocks a lot of malware-related domains in web browsers.)

Whoops! I actually meant SpywareBlaster! Spybot seems to have fallen out of favour, although I still use it, along with SpywareBlaster.