Think your free antivirus is safe to use? .... think again

Agreed. Everyone should make a system restore first, then run a scan with Malwarebytes, Eset online and your own anti virus to see what is there, if you want to keep the PUP and if it can be removed. If you are unhappy use System Restore. I use and am happy with Avast, and also know that Panda has one PUP that is found and removed by Eset online.
Also read the terms carefully. They will tell you and many times allow you not to install.

Excellent link and article, thanks for posting!

A reminder: Only download software directly from the creator/publisher of the software :)

Just use MSE. It's free from Microsoft with no PUP's or crapware of any kind. It works for me.
PUP's are the new way of stealing.

edee I hope everybody reads your post. I would save a lot of headaches.

MSE had been consistently scoring lower than anyone else on AV testing studies. Even McAfee is better.

edee said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

MSE had been consistently scoring lower than anyone else on AV testing studies. Even McAfee is better.

Not true at all, although that's what they like you to believe, these big AV vendors wouldn't want to lose money to an AV that comes preinstalled on an OS that is completely free and does not depend on ads and such for revenue now would they? so lets make everyone think it's useless and the masses believe them and keep laying down their cash for protection of equal or less value.

It's all about education, if configured properly no one antivirus or security suite is better than another, no one third party firewall stops every intrusion and no one antivirus catches everything.

Again, wrong. Read the following for starters:

AV-Comparatives Real-World Protection Test » AV-Comparatives

Test antivirus software for Windows 7 - August 2014 | AV-TEST

What

I personally don't care about all those anti virus compare charts. They were BS 5 years ago when I bought the the 3rd part anti virus programs. And I bought many of them. In my opinion they are still BS. A lot of people use MSE and are happy with it.
The best one is the one that works for you.

https://www.opswat.com/resources/rep...us-august-2013

Antivirus Vendor (click to expand)
Market share

AMicrosoft
25.8%

BAvast
23.6%

CAVG
9.1%

DSymantec
8.4%

EESET
7.1%

FAvira
6.6%

GKaspersky Lab
5.8%

HMcAfee
3.1%

IBitdefender
2.1%

Other
8.4%

Several years ago, they did their 'comparatives' using XP, just to make MSE look bad. MSE was not designed for XP and has never worked well on XP. I have no idea what they use now and could care less. The best anti Virus, is pay attention where you go, what you download and from whom. And read the fine print.