Free Antivirus

Can any one suggest best free antivirus other than microsoft security essentials??

Avast has worked very well for me. Skip all the add-on stuff and stay with the basic protection to limit pop-ups.

I used the AVG free version. It worked really well for me. However, I heard Avast is also a very reliable option :)

I'm using Avira in one of my computers and ClamWin in another, so far without surprises, like them both, but to begin with I would recommend Avira just for the sake of having a real-time scanner.

I was using Avast at work and after getting TONS of false positives, I dumped it.

jpchint said:

Can any one suggest best free antivirus other than microsoft security essentials??

It depends on how you define "best".

As you probably know, there is a class of software that is considered "Potentially Unwanted Programs" (PUPs). Some antivirus tools ignore PUPs, others stop them. For example, The Conduit tool bar is a PUP that Panda Cloud Antivirus (PCA) stops, but Avira allows.

Some users that I support kept asking me to remove Conduit, for those users, PCA is the best free av tool.

But PCA is a young product that needs some minor bugs worked out and it is best to leave the settings at the their default values unless you want to spend a lot of time learning the impact of changing each setting.

I had tried Panda Cloud Free a good year ago, and abandoned it - I don't remember exactly why, but I felt it wasn't quite ready yet. But I just tried it again on a netbook, and was quite pleased with it on a preliminary basis. With netbooks, you're always looking for something lightweight. Panda seems to achieve that while still giving some user configurability. Meanwhile I've been finding that MSE is not as lightweight as one might think.

The only shortcoming I found with Panda was the lack of ability to schedule scans. But that's due out soon in the next beta.

Hi. I'm wondering how much resources does MSE use exactly? My avira uses about 1800kB to around 2900kB. I once heard that MSE uses about 50MB of RAM? Is that true?

Btw, I would recommend avira, I dumped avast after the "2014" version. I just didn't like it anymore. I also use MBAM, only the free version, not PRO. It also seems that pop-ups in avira has returned, is anyone else getting ad like pop-ups? It's not everyday I get them, just once every week or every other week. Is there any way to disable them?