News AVG Free is best free anti-virus

It's funny how when you check anti-virus company websites they ALL claim to be the best lol.

I've only ever had one virus in all my many years of PC use and that was when I was using Virgin Media's PCGuard which was free with my broadband.

After that I had to reinstall windows and from then on I've been using ESET NOD which I think is a lovely little anti-virus product. Highly recommended (and according to their website it's also the best lol)

 

If all you need to do is manually scan files every now and then, I recommend the www.VirusTotal.com service.

It's not very fast, but it runs your files through 34 different virus scanners. They also have a convenient little 140KB (really!) app that add a "Send to Virustotal" option to your right-click menu, and hashes the file locally to see if someone's already scanned it.

 

Using Avast for 4 or 5 years with pretty much no problems.
Switched from AVG due to massive issues (this was years ago, so I won't say its still buggy, it could very well be improved by now, but Avast has been working, so I won't switch.)
Years ago, friends and family would ask me to see why their computer had slowed to a crawl. Almost always I would uninstall Norton, then put AVG on, this would fix it, but eventually I would get complaints of bugginess with AVG or viruses that had gotten through, so I started putting Avast on all of them. I haven't had to fix anyones computer in 2+ years now since switching everyone to Avast.

 

I used to be a huge AVG fan, but I found the last 2 versions of the free client to be bloaty and annoying, currently using avast on this machine and msse on my laptop, for a microsoft product msse is very good, which surprised the hell out of me.

 

what he said.

 

weird, I find avg worst than msse, on a couple of systems that had avg free I found all of them infected by something imo, its one of the reasons why I just ditched "free anti virus products" and just went to the the commercial ones, since honestly, they dont cost that much

 

Admittedly it was about 3-4 years ago but when I switched from AVG to Avast! I was very impressed at how discreet it was compared to AVG, literally haven't used anything else since.


Though when it comes to viruses and spyware I always wonder what people are doing/downloading/viewing to get any form of malicious software. I haven't had any even remotely dangerous code running on my machines since I shared one with my sister (4-5 years ago)....

 

As long as magazines like PC-Pro are recieving money for advertising from people like AVG, I will pay no attention to the results. It's not the first time a magazine will have not given a AV product an independant review because they haven't paid for enough marketing.

Also a lot a testers will use completely irrelevant tests rather than in the wild viruses. As far as I'm concerned the only relevant AV Tests are Virus Bulleting and West Coast Labs. In which AVG has failed a large number of tests.

It's worth noting that it's Illegal to use AVG Free in a Business.

Free AV is free for a reason. The only product I will recommend to any one ESET which not only performs under scrutiny without chewing resources, its well priced.

 

AVG does not have a 64bit version - what is recommended for those of us jumping to win 7 64bit?

 

I'm using AVG on Win 7 64bit Home Premium with no trouble

 

Comodo internet security free = WIN