Need a free AV for mom's computer.

I have just switched a couple of desktops from Avast Free to Avira Free and have not seen any pop-ups or other messages asking for money. So far it seems to be quieter than the latest Avast (DeepScreen) and test results look decent too.

 

The latest avast seems to have followed its earlier trend and become an ad-infested monstrosity.

I have never seen so many advertisements and shining banners to urge you to "upgrade" etc.

I think their forum will clarify this in its entirety.

 

Red Moon, I'm of the opinion that the previous version 13 seemed more ad-happy than version 14. I admit I've only upgraded to it in the last couple of days, so perhaps I am missing something. If you are referring to the Store tab, I would argue that that is where all of the upgrade prompts and ads belong instead of popping up on my screen like version 13 seemed determined to do. I quite like the new version. It seems very stable and quiet.

If the author of the original post has not yet come to a decision, I too would cast my ballot for Avast. It has kept me out of harms way for a couple of years now.

 

Ive set up my family and clients with avast! 2014 free with hardened mode on aggressive and sandboxie and ivr had no complaints or prpblems yet.

 

In my opinion avast can be a better choice.
it is simpler,faster and has less impact on system.

 

Thanks again for your input everyone and I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. For the time being I have Avira installed. It tried to sneak a toolbar in after the install but luckily Firefox was forced to run sandboxed. I uninstalled the toolbar from add-remove programs.

The weird thing was I had both toolbar option unticked. After that you need to either choose Install or Don't Install. Against my better judgement I clicked install because I didn't know if Avira had finished installing or not. That was the wrong choice.

Also, how much memory does Avira's processes typically use on Win 7 64 bit? Does it run fine on a machine with 4GB RAM? If I remember right one of the processes was using 250,000K. I'm mainly asking because I have less that 1GB of RAM free on that machine. I might need to get stingy.

 

pretty sneaky for an av. what do you mean Firefox was forced to run sandboxed.?

 

Actually, Avira's not that sneaky - it makes it very clear with a separate pop-up window that you have the option of not installing the Ask toolbar. I do wish it were opt-in (so that the default is no toolbar) instead of opt-out. But installing the toolbar has the added advantage of turning on Avira's web protection, so it's not all bad.

 

In my machine it takes 45MB (5 processes), no toolbar but I have web-protection installed.

 

How about the following situation: I have only 895 mb of ram memory (total), and I don't think Avira will succeed on my computer.
I have windows xp service pack 3 (32-bit).

Here is the funny thing:
When I installed Avast with everything on I looked at my task manager, I saw that it takes 318 mb out of 2168 mb

I'm confused how can anything with totality of 895 mb ram memory when I click ctr+alt+delete and task manager opens and shows 2168 mb?
It doesn't make any sense.
I don't know what to do at all.
I personally think that I will be risking too much space by installing newest Avira free.

 

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3356675

 

I forgot that you need to do a "Custom Install" to avoid the Ask toolbar installation. I always do a "custom install" (of anything), so it just slipped my mind.

 

get comodo Internet security its haves a great behavior blocker,with sandbox to boot and its light on the ram

 

I don't remember seeing any BB in V6, nor ever heard a BB was included in V6. There are some talks about BB implementation but I think it will be included at least in V7. Unless you consider the auto-sandbox as a BB, which is clearly not true.

 

That's right.

 

I'll also go with forticlient, just set all to quarantine. it will never ask or pop up anything.

 

I'd recommend MSE as it is simple & effective. I've actually put it on my mom's computer for her.

 

The Panda Cloud Free AV does seem slightly lighter than MSE & I was quite impressed with it. Unfortunately I found that it was prone to false-positives even on the first day I ran it. Inevitably I went with MSE. I do think that if Panda could fix this it would be a great contender though. I think it's a brilliant idea.

 

That's interesting, I've been using Panda Cloud, 2.2.1, 2.2, & now 2.3 and never once have I had a FP.

 

It's possible some may get it (fp's) at some point or other in real world situation.
See here, http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php...and change filter to "False Alarm Test", 2013, Sept, by value.

Panda and Avira seem to be scoring well at AV-C, but unfortunately at the expense of double the fp's as, say, Emsisoft or Avast.

-cheers,
feandur

 

If i'd have to decide between MSE and Panda Cloud, the decision couldn't be any easier. Panda Cloud of course. Very good protection, light and auto updates itself without any user intervention. No yearly registrations either. Several reasons why i'm installing Panda Cloud to systems where i don't have control to check them out regularly.

This yearly registration nonsense with avast! is really the only thing that's preventing me from trusting other systems to avast!. Because no matter how good it is, it's worthless if it's not registered and we know how reliable are users to do that. They just click cancel for the screen to go away and that's it.
I don't get it why are they insisting so much on this registration crap.

 

I second that! AVG Free is ok as well, no need to renew licences.

RejZoR, is it really you? The registration nonsense is the main reason I don't install Avast on newbie systems.

 

Yes, it is me. And yes, it's really annoying and unnecessary. What's the point of simplifying the interface like they did with v2014 if in the end, some stupid registration process overcomlicates the very essence of the program (protection).

There are other ways to let users know about paid versions. They already show notifications for stuff liek VPN service, so why not make the registration nonsense go away and display a popup twice a year to let users know about the paid versions? I'd much rather have that than unregistered versions of avast! because users just don't want to be bothered with that or because they just plain don't understand the thing and they just want to get rid of it as fast as possible (the re-registration notification).