Which is the Best Free Anti Virus for Win 7

I'm currently using and have been using for years, AntiVir which is free (or has a free version I should say).

I've also tried MSE and must say that it is just as good if not better then AntiVir.

Vicky said:

Hi All, thank you very much to all of you for helping me out, really appreciate your suggestions, after reading all of yours comments, for the time being I have decided to go with MSE first. For the AVG I have read on net that their latest version is eating up lot of system resources and system is getting slow, so will start from MSE, any idea correct place to get MSE from?

Here is the home page for MSE:

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

I don't like MSE because to individually scan a single file via the context menu, the resident shield has to be active. (from the quick play I had with it anyway)

I prefer to not having a resident scanner enabled.

Avira is good, but there are a few 'nag' screens promoting other products in it's range. It's also pretty big on 'false positives' (I'm not a fan of promoting nag screens)

Avast 5 beta root kit scan gives you options to select with a keyboard when completed - which none seemed to work with a USB mouse, requiring a hard reset.

Then again I have a few different versions of Seven installed to test each A/V and haven't spent barely enough time with each apart from Avast 4.8

And Chev65 is right, AVG and Norton are just as bad as viruses themselves - they cause more harm than help