Free AV and Real Time

What free antivirus softwares out there offer real time scanning and which one's don't.

If realtime scanning has to be disabled what is the normal procedure to this

Real time scanning means that the AV software is ON and scanning consistently in the background.

 

ALL of the big three; AVG, Avast, AntiVir have real-time scanning.

You can temporarily disable the RTM in a number of ways depending upon the particular program. Either from the system tray icon menu, within the main GUI, from Task Manager, or from Services on an NT system.

BitDefender, eScan's (MicroWorld's) AntiVirus Toolkit Utility, Dr Web's CureIT and F-Prot for DOS do not; only on-demand scanners.

 

CA's eTrust, from Microsoft....very light, and quite effective. I'd add that to AVG and Avast to be the big 3x popular freebies.

 

I wonder how long CA has this offer on for. Technically speaking its not a free AV as free to that of Avast Home or AVG Free edition, but more so a free 1 yr trial.

 

Well it's not exactly a trial. Most of trials last for 30 days. avast! offers it for 60 days. Some others offer it for 90 days. But thats the top. This CA's offer is a promotion because they give you 1 year full license. All AVs have option to buy 1 year license. Here, they give it for free. It's a clear difference between trial and promotion.

 

They've had it since, I either SP3 or SP4 for Windows 2000 came out...you could order a "free" security CD from them with various windows updates and other security tools on them, a second CD in the set had the antivirus and a firewall on it. Free...just had to fill out a very brief online request form.

It's been available for download from their website for quite a while also. It doesn't cost anything...so to me, that means "free". After the 1 year get another one.