Whats the best FREE Anti-Virus program out there

[rchristensen]

What does everyone think is the best FREE Anti-Virus program out there. I have used AVG in the past but now run Norton on all my computers. People often ask what is a good free anti virus program and I really don't know what to recommend.

 

[tcbusch]

AVG
or
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/nov08/11-18NoCostSecurityPR.mspx

 

[ccote]

Stay away from AVG, it's a resource hog. I used Avast for a bit and it was better.

 

[klejeune]

Norton was/is a resource hog. I was turned onto AVG (not the free version) by the guys who replaced the HD in my notebook PC. Way faster and doesn't use near the resources of Norton. Norton was actually slowing my PC down to a crawl until I deleted it. I think Symantec finally realized they were losing customers and may have changed the way it works on the newer versions. My experience was from 3 years ago or so.

Remember, with Free you get what you pay for.

Or, you could just tell them to get a Mac...

 

[sstanton]

I use Avast and found that it is way better than AVG, McCafee, or Norton. I found that it doesnt tie up as much of my computer as the others did.

 

[bmcmeen]

I think what is really telling, whether the AV software is free or not, is the number of false positives or misses that it reports.

Being in IT, we kinda live on the edge here at the office (I'll go no further than that

) and we have submitted files to www.virustotal.com, which will scan files with about 40 AV products and shows which report issues and which don't.

Needless to say, it's a crapshoot. No single tool will catch it all. Period.

And I always wonder, with the number of AV programs that come out of Eastern Europe, how many of these are really trustworthy? I know for the longest time Kaspersky was considered to be all but a virus author...

As always, if you're careful what sites you visit, are cognizant of phishing attempts and don't open suspicious attachments (turning off "hide file extensions" is a good place to start), you'll be good to go whether you use IE, FF, Opera or even lynx at a CMD prompt.

Myself, I get by with a paid subscription to AVG AV only at home, Micro$oft's Windows Defender, ClamAV (free open source) for my Linux server and ad-hoc scanning on Windows, and the company's corporate Trend Micro software on the laptop.