Antivirus for Windows

Support for Windows 7 is coming to an end and I need a good antivirus to replace MSE.

Years ago, I used the free versions of AVG and Avast. Are these still the best around or is there something better. I checked out AV Total which it says is free, but that NOT true..

Suggestions are very much appreciated.

as far as i know the Virus definitions will be updated for MSE the actual Program [platform] wont be [and it was not updated since 30 November 2016] i am going to stay with MSE for as long the Definitions are updated MSE and a bit of common sense and that's all you need.

That is a neat thing to know.
Thank you.

RolandJS said:

Will Windows 7's Defender still be updated as MSE is updated?

not sure about Defender. Although on MSE i am bypassing updates from Windows Update [i have it completely disabled] i had to use a registry trick so i can update MSE definitions trough MMPC manually or automatic [Microsoft Malware Protection Center]

dtoxic said:

........Although on MSE i am bypassing updates from Windows Update [i have it completely disabled] i had to use a registry trick so i can update MSE definitions trough MMPC manually or automatic [Microsoft Malware Protection Center]

This is strange, I’ve had Windows Update set to “Never check for updates” for very long time and only install ones I choose. But MSE has always automatically installed definition updates without me doing anything, during that same period.

Like you I plan to continue using MSE as long as definition updates continue.

Struggling7 said:

This is strange, I’ve had Windows Update set to “Never check for updates” for very long time and only install ones I choose. But MSE has always automatically installed definition updates without me doing anything, during that same period.

Like you I plan to continue using MSE as long as definition updates continue.

well for some reason when i disabled windows update [not the conventional way by selecting "never check for updates] i had to restort to that reg trick to make MSE pull updates automatically since it would always throw an error and complain that the service is disabled etc etc.... [to be expected i guess] but now everything works as it should plus the whole update service is disabled

dtoxic said:

well for some reason when i disabled windows update [not the conventional way by selecting "never check for updates] i had to restort to that reg trick to make MSE pull updates automatically since it would always throw an error and complain that the service is disabled etc etc.... [to be expected i guess] but now everything works as it should plus the whole update service is disabled

Like they say, more than one way to skin a cat. I guess.

First go to, and take permission [ownership] of the following key [Signature Updates] located in

Code:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware

here you need to change the following "FallbackOrder" Key

Code:

MicrosoftUpdateServer|MMPC

to

Code:

MMPC|MicrosoftUpdateServer

basically just replace the order or completely remove the "|" [pipe character] and "MicrosoftUpdateServer" leaving just "MMPC" and that's it, for security reasons restore the [ownership] of the key to it's defaults

What this does is ignore the Windows update servers and goes straight to Microsoft Malware Protection Center for Definition Updates, thus you can completely stop the "WU" service and it wont matter to MSE

Alternatively if you do not want to mess with the registry you could use command line

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\MpCmdRun.exe” -SignatureUpdate -MMPC

same thing only you wont have the benefit of MSE updating it self automatically every 24h and you would need to schedule it via Batch or something similar