13 Comments

The Best Antivirus is Free

July 23, 2007 by in Tech with 13 Comments

Gone are the days of paying for bloated overextended virus scanners such and Norton or MacAfee. Seems like everyone and their mother is offering some form of free antiviral protection. It is important to keep your computer protected, but with so many choices such as AVG, Avast, BitDefender, Panda, etc out there choosing the right scanner is tough.

My personal choice for Antivirus scanning is AntiVir. It is a quick and small application occupying only 34MB on your hard drive and only uses 3 running processes in Windows. AntiVir also has an interface that’s easy to navigate, with pre-configured tasks for scanning local drives, local hard disks, removal drives, the Windows System and My Documents folders, as well as manual scanning. AntiVir also has a right-click scanning feature that can be performed on individual files and folders in Explorer or on the desktop. Additionally, files can be dragged and dropped into the AntiVir console for quick scanning.

Seems ideal for my daily use, and has caught every virus I threw at it to test AntiVir’s reliability. Don’t agree? Drop a comment on your personal choice for antivirus protection.


  • Howard

    Thank you for the tip, I will try this AV out sometime. I currently use ESET’s NOD32 as my antivirus. I like it being light and mono-functional. I don’t like those suites and pakages which bogs down the computer. I’ve heard Blink from eEye is very good also. It was a company formed by an ex-hacker who got caught by the FBI at age 17 or something. The Blink antivirus got some type of AI built in which determines if it is a virus instead of depending on the list of updates issued like regular antivirus companies do.

  • David Bendit

    ESET’s NOD32 is either the best or 2nd best AV scanner out there. The big fight is generally between them and Kaspersky, which is fantastic, but very, very slow. NOD32 has the perfect balance between speed and reliability (read: their active scanner doesn’t slow down your computer at all). System scanning can be done with heuristics enabled, which slow it down, but bring it to Kaspersky’s level of reliability.

    Plus, it scans all incoming data from the web, emails, and ties into MS Office to scan documents as they load. Best security you can get.

  • Ian

    I too have heard good things about eEye’s Blink, but haven’t tried it myself personally.

    Dan, can AntiVir be run as a portable app?

  • RobJN

    The free “Active Virus Shield” is based on Kaspersky (which always performs well in tests). And by based I actually mean the logos have been changed and the price has been dropped to zero! Its branded as AOL but as far as I can see they haven’t changed anything so no need to worry.

  • Jerry

    I’ve been a fan of AVG for years, even got my work to switch (amazingly).
    I’d be willing to try others though.

  • Brandon T

    I’ve been using AVG Free for many years now and I’ve had great success with it. The Grisoft team has been punctual with pushing out definition updates and kept the program sleek and easy to use.

    I have used AntiVir for a brief period of time on my work machine but ended up switching back to AVG. It’s just hard to beat!

  • Alan Rager

    I’ve been using ClamWin for a while now, and it seems to do fine, though I wish that the WinPooch app didn’t kill my computer when I tried to install it to do active scans or whatnot. ClamWin is the Open Source AV I found from osalt.

  • chad

    been using AVG for years now

  • Sriram

    Have been using Avast (www.avast.com) antivirus – Its pretty good for my home pc (and its home editinn is free) — A good AV thus far with no strings attached

  • mac

    my antivirus is mac os x, owned.

  • http://www.musmo.com KwangErn Liew

    I have used AntiVir and AVG in the past, it is lightweight but it was missing more than what Avast offer. Though Avast can be heavy, I wouldn’t recommend it for low-end PCs. It’s a complete solution with minimal configuration and care needed. Works well for my parents who aren’t computer savvy. So far so good with Avast.

    Haven’t compared Avast with other AVs recently. So am sure that things have changed.

  • Hax

    @ ian
    >> Dan, can AntiVir be run as a portable app?

    no. i guess you better use clamwin for this purpose.

  • http://www.iphone-vt.com Randy

    I use CA security Suite, as it is a holistic system covering all the bases in one program… 50mb in size covers Antivirus, spyware and adware, spam and firewall… any of which can be active or not.

    I do a lot of installs of this system on client machines and pretty much ALWAYS find tons of malware no matter what it is replacing (usually Norton, McAfee, or AVG). It is totally automated, the spyware/adware scan takes about 10 seconds, and when purchased (yes is costs money but can save loads if you are not digging for problems in your system all day due to intrusions) comes with three licenses for a little more than AVG costs. Plus they insure the user if their system gets f*$#d up, up to $4500!

    Any reason anyone has experienced NOT to use this? I would love to hear feedback.

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