What's the best free AV?

Well Blaze the real best AV is not having a computer at all. lol.

 

These are the free ones I know of:

AntiVir Personal Edition
http://www.free-av.com/

AVAST32 Antivirus
http://www.avast.com/

AVG Anti-Virus System
http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_index.htm

F-Prot Antivirus for DOS
http://www.f-prot.com/products/fpdos.html

Both AVG and F-Prot have excellent reputations. F-Prot is known for its macro virus detection and cleaning abilities. AVG is perhaps best known for its outgoing email scanning (certifying your email to be virus-free).

None of the free products can afford to update their signatures as often as the paid products. Perhaps notageek has the right idea: use a paid product as primary AV, and a free product as a backup.

 

F-Prot provides daily updates if you download the signature files from a f-secure ftp-server.

But I agree a free av cannot replace a commercial one at the moment. And F-Prot for DOS is the perfect second scanner because it works on demand only.

wizard

 

You didn't mention

Antidote
http://www.vintage-solutions.com/English/Antivirus/Super/Download.html

which although being only a "Detect-only program" can be useful
and

Central Command’s Vexira Antivirus Rescue Disk
http://www.centralcommand.com/

which uses more or less the same definitions of Antivir PE and can be used in Windows XP, instead of Fprot for Dos which doesn't run in Windows XP (it only scans some directories)

 

Personally I have yet to have a bad experience with AVG. If you keep the virus sigs updated, scan your system regularly and implement a heaping dose of healthy paranoia and use both an IDS and firewall, then you are you in good shape. There is nothing wrong with FREE. Just depends on how vigilant you are when using said free product, partcularly when it comes to pc security.

 

Quite right.
A virus is hardly more then a threat that exploits some vulnerability (system or user related). If you can diminish the risks involved by reducing the number of vulnerabilities, it is not sooo very important which tooling you use. It's just a matter of compensating risks by taking the right measures. And free or not: I feel there is no single best tool.

Touch wood... all the virusses my scanner caught last few years were IE related.
The risk is not the virus, it's the wrong infrastructure... So for real protection 'a heaping dose of healthy paranoia' calls for changing that

 

lol i'd rather pay for AVG and F-Prot than have Norton or Mcafee for free. the latter two AV scanners are completely useless. I can have a trojan passed Norton just by changing a certain U to a u. I can have a trojan past Mcafee just by changing 6 letters with a hex editor. stick to the free ones mcafee and norton are useless!

 

Hmmm, I turfed AVG because it was always late in getting new updates even though I had configured to check for updates daily. Even manually, it would not download the current available update. Soooo, I am giving Avast a try. So far so good, except for a one time false positive warning.
http://www.smiliegenerator.de/s23/smilies-44069.png

 

I use AntiVir Personal Edition and I pretty like it. Although there was Norton on this pc initially, I unistalled it.

 

Why nobody spoke about BitDefender Free and Avast?

 

Exactly....I have now got BitDefender and Avast (Both d/loaded to-day after a little bit of a wake-up call with 'Bagle O' that had somehow got itself involved in a couple of photographs and wouldn't let me send in email without my server stopping them in their tracks......had me scratching my head for a bit 'til Snapdragin came to my aid. Also use AVG....all brilliant...and free.

Cochise,

 

I use avast (home) too -- upgrades are quite frequent, "normally" two or three times a week but I've seen 2 or even 3 the same day if there's a flood of new things hitting the net.

And support is top-notch, quite active forums in which participation ranges from the Alwil team themselves down to folks who got their first-ever computer last Christmas, and just about every level of experience and expertise in between.

 

AVG is too much of a RAM hog for my crappy old computer to handle.

I use AntiVir as a primary AV program. Antivir doesn't have much when it comes to heuristics, though, so if it ever seems that something has gotten past it, I run a scan with F-Prot for DOS.

Maybe I'll eventually dish out some money for F-Prot for Windows. Then I won't have to have AntiVir for resident protection.

 

I find Norton Antivirus 2003 not bad too. Does a good job too. I just find the subscirption service for Norton antivirus not necessary. Wonder why symantec put in this subscription thing for. Probably they wanna make more money.

 

I have 2 machines, on my old one with Win98SE I uninstalled Norton AV because of the subscription, and installed AVG. However, the resident boot up check kept crashing my Machine and I couldnt even get into SAFEMODE. It took me a week to sort out. Eventually I uninstalled AVG and installed AVAST........................wonderful. No problems at all. Has anybody else had this problem with AVG??
My newer machine with XP had Norton NIS and AV pre installed so I have stuck with that, but I see the file size is about 125 MB for both. Too much for my liking.
Gordon

 

I've heard that Panda is putting out a free antivirus program again... you might want to check it out. Just beware of false alarms, though. (Apparently the heuristics aren't top-notch.)

 

I have Been using Anti-vir for a Year nearly Now and I have had No problem with it exept 1 and that is that whenever i change to another window it will crash and I will have to restart the prog and start again but other than that its kept my comp quite safe sooo a thumbs up to Anti-Vir

 

Second that.
And André, may I say: what a wonderful way of expressing - must remember that one!

grtz
Slammer

 

Thanks but I wish that I was that fluent in English. I surely quoted it from someone else?

 

Technodrome, don't you think that F-Prot for Dos updates are a little bit difficult?

 

As this poll seems not to outline On-Demand snanners out, Please, if u really know better free scanner than eScan Free,

http://www.mwti.net/antivirus/free_utilities.asp

tell me immediately.

eScan Free has Kaspersky engine and is also capable to scan those riskware nasties that Kaspersky is only able to do with extended update settings.

It has only two weaknessies in my mind;

1. u need a broadband connection, because the program can't update, so u must download that updated version every time u scan.

2. The size of those scanned files is limited (if I remember right, u are able to scan files that are less than 1 Mb).

The extra plus in eScan Free is also that, eScan is able to delete those infected archived files as a whole or rename those infected ones. Very useful if u are scanning infected archived samples colletions, the rest u have in your infected folder after a scan, are those that eScan wasn't able to detect as infected. Why to scan infected archives? Different av:s are reporting the number of infections differently, when you scan infected archives, all scanners are reporting those zipped files about the same way.

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

Escan has Kaspersky engine but Escan free is not Kaspersky Antivirus. I used Escan free but it missed somthing and had false positive.

 

@Firefighter

There aren't any tests about eScan free. In other posts I read that you made insteresting studies about antivirus (i.e. Claim Antivirus). Is there anything on eScan free, too?

Regards

 

To c0ltran3 from Firefighter!

Don't worry about eScan, just scanned my 1375 infected archived samples collection. EScan 4.2.4 detected 1272, when KAV 5.0.121 missed one that eScan detected (eScan won!),

cyn2.0.zip->EdtSrv.exe is infected with Backdoor:Win32/Cyn.2_0

by RAV online scan.

OK, it was editserver, but anyway, no bigger problems with eScan!

The best not KAV engined av scored 1183, BitDefender 7.2 Free, ClamWin scored 931.

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

@Firefighter: Thank you I'm really surprised of the results of your tests. In the past I used eScan free for some months but I wasn't satisfied.