Anybody Know a decent Free Anti-Virus?

[Zfactor]

My friend needs a free Anti-Virus for his computer while he tries to coax his parents into footing the bill for Norton's or comparable software. Anybody know any good programs?

[deuces wild]

AVG 7 http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/

[benb]

Clamwin Antivirus. Free, open-source, works well for me.

http://www.clamwin.com/

[scuzzman]

clamav is good - i used it to scan for windows virii on my win partition (when it existed lol)

but for my stand-alone windows machines, i use AVG7

works very well for me

[andsome]

In the end it will boil down to personal choice. Expect plenty of conflicting answers.

[-pops-]

I can't see any reason why your friend needs to coax his parents to buy Norton A/V or Norton anything else. Regulars here will know that I will not have ANYTHING with the Norton monika near my machines, let alone installed in them.

I manage very well with AVG as my anti-virus, Sygate as my firewall, together with the usual freebie anti-spyware programs.

The important thing with all of them is to keep up to date and use regularly.

[andsome]

Try looking here. I usually agree with pops, but NOT on this subject. I personally wouldn't use anything but Symantec (Norton). It really is personal choice.

Virus bulletin

[Rebel=UK=]

Try looking here.  I usually agree with pops, but NOT on this subject.  I personally wouldn't use anything but Symantec (Norton).  It really is personal choice.

Virus bulletin

I agree with him ive always used them (NAV & NIS). Only ever had slight probs with them nothing major

[scuzzman]

I can't see any reason why your friend needs to coax his parents to buy Norton A/V or Norton anything else. Regulars here will know that I will not have ANYTHING with the Norton monika near my machines, let alone installed in them.

I manage very well with AVG as my anti-virus, Sygate as my firewall, together with the usual freebie anti-spyware programs.

The important thing with all of them is to keep up to date and use regularly.

I'm going to agree with -pops- on this one. Won't allow Symantec or McAfee products within 10 feet of my computers.

[doug]

10 feet sounds like a barge pole.

[deuces wild]

I can't see any reason why your friend needs to coax his parents to buy Norton A/V or Norton anything else. Regulars here will know that I will not have ANYTHING with the Norton monika near my machines, let alone installed in them.

I manage very well with AVG as my anti-virus, Sygate as my firewall, together with the usual freebie anti-spyware programs.

The important thing with all of them is to keep up to date and use regularly.

I'm going to agree with -pops- on this one. Won't allow Symantec or McAfee products within 10 feet of my computers.

I third it! :P

[Zfactor]

Just because some of you don't like nortons doesn't mean other don't. Anyway I found a free subscription offer through windows and he is using that now (i forget the company, but its a free year).

[madboy33]

Symantec and McAfee

The name of those 2 products as anti-virus makes me shudder

They slow the computer down, cause untold problems and just are generally a pain to configure.

I use AVG (well nothing at the moment as caning dvd's on my hard drive) and Zone Alarm as my firewall

[andsome]

As I said at the start of this thread, plenty of conflicting answers. I particularly like Norton, not just because the AV program and firewall have never let me down, but I also find the other tools in System Works extremely useful.

[Cpt James T. Kirk]

im on andsomes side on this one. i used to use nis2004 and true it was a resource hog. but now i use nis2005 and it seems to be much better than 2004 was. and i like the new layout of it. i used mcaffe once on my first computer and i hated it. i never could keep it running right. nis2005 has given me no problems so far, over the numerous liveupdate issues i had with nis2004.

[craigsoft]

Give AntiVir a try. Its free and it can be set to download new virus updates automatically without disturbing you while you work. I have it on my site (link below) you'll find it on the Internet page. :)

[andsome]

I take it you mean H+BEDV(ANTIVIR). Check this out. 4 passes and 8 failures

Virus bulletin

[Daphne]

I agree with Andsome regarding Norton. However, IMHO, the best feature of Norton is its Firewall. At home we had NAVirus. it was too "heavy", though very easy to customise. Our Win98SE "powerd" PCs needed a lot for normal processes. Then I changed to AVAST (free version) and noticed the difference. But wait. AVAST is quite liter than NAV, and offers more features, like P2P and Messenger protection. But is not that customisable as NAV was. Regarding exclusion of progs that should not be live scanned (AVAST resident real time scanner), the interface is restricted to 255 chars. So, u don't feel comfortable typing in the dark and hoping your inputs are taken into account somewhere in AVAST. The pros are its improved speed at thorough scans and that it has a good track of trojans - I found a couple of them sitting on my PC in spite of NAV. Well, things change, and it could be a matter of virus database updates and the date of release and when u update. I don' know. So far my experience. :flowers:

[trackrat]

Give AntiVir a try. Its free and it can be set to download new virus updates automatically without disturbing you while you work. I have it on my site (link below) you'll find it on the Internet page.  :)

Craigsoft, I have just been looking at your website and found the homepage confusing.

I sorted it out by seeing what I could click on and seeing where it took me, once in it was easy to navigate.

[r4may]

I agree with andsome, I have been using Norton Internet Security/Anti Virus for years and never had any problems. Just make sure you get the weekly updates (every Wednesday) to keep full protected.

Which AV to use is very much a case of personal preferance and experience and most, including the free one, do the job quite well.

[Cpt James T. Kirk]

im still on andsomes side with this one. i have used nortons nis 2004 and now using 2005 and as i said before, yeah, 2004 was a bit of a hog, but it seems much improved, at least to me, on the 2005 version.

but many people use the free ones and they better ones i have seen mentioned numerous times everywhere i go are the avg7 and avast. i see folks using them quite a bit. but for me, i will use norton. i hate mcaffe, it messed my system up when it was originally installed on my dell, which is now in pooter heaven, so i went with norton and have been happy using it.

[homecomputeraid]

Another free one is Avast Antivirus. http://www.avast.com/

I do prefer AVG myself.

It is a matter of personal preference, but I tend to shy my customers (if they're home users) away from Symantec and McAffee due to the recurring costs. Some people are adamant that they like and trust the pay versions. In my experience, they're probably swayed by advertising, since there doesn't seem to be any huge advantage to the larger, more costly paid for programs.

If you look at some sites that test Antivirus products like http://www.icsalabs.com/html/communities/a...rus/index.shtml, http://www.av-test.org/, or http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/, you'll see that no Antivirus program is impervious, and I don't see that the pay programs are significantly better than the free ones.

Good luck deciding! Hope we helped.

[seasider28]

I bought Norton Internet Security (2001) and installed it on an AMD K6 450 Win98 machine. I removed it after a couple of months because my PC started crawling. For the past 2 years or so I have used AVG and ZoneAlarm and have never been penetrated!