Recommended free anti-virus?

I always prefers proven and tested in real battles protective gears. Multi-awarded with a history. You can't settle for anything less. It's too risky. Don't make your machine as one of their testing grounds unless you are a millionaire.

Free - Avira AntiVir Personal

Paid - Eset NOD32 Home Edition

[ + Sandboxie + VPN + Firefox ]

 

Also, what is everyone's opinion on ThreatFire?

 

Oh now come on! Not again. Emsisoft says it all here. It is a full-fledged standalone app. It is powerful enough and must be used alone. Emsisoft lets users like you, who would not listen to any argument and logic but just wants to brute force their way into getting EAM together with another AV, use EAM and made EAM compatible. It is not 'designed for that purpose'. It's not complementary but compatible. Get over it. Move on. Don't just hang on the past(A2 Square was complementary and only detected and removed Trojans, Backdoors, Spyware, Adware, Worms, Keyloggers, Bots and Dialers). Emsisoft Antimalware has now become a full tool against all types of harmful software, including all types of Viruses. They even brought a second Award Wining Ikarus engine onto their wagon. Now they use dual engine Ikarus Antivirus and Emsisoft Antimalware engines. What else do you want Emsisoft to do to make their Antimalware a standalone full fledged AV like Norton AV, Kaspersky AV, Bitdefender AV? And why would a user pay for a full-fledged standalone AV and then use it as if as a compatible secondary security layer to a free AV/IS? It's like using Norton AV to Kaspersky IS or vice verse.

Please kindly do not pass on your misconception to other new users.

@Cerburus
Don't listen to guest. He now uses 3 Avs(and two of them are full-fledged IS) Comodo Internet Security, Webroot SecureAnywhere! And he doesn't need all those as he himself says here post #13 :

 

Exception is WSA which allows the other AV to scan first and it scans later. Also it does not scan a file twice as it already analyzed the file with the cloud database(although I'm not sure if it is correct). The scanning and removing will still be a slight slow.

I thought there was only ScriptNo for Chrome and no NoScript.

 

I agree completely.

 

@Iron Man; Thank you.

After reviewing this forum and following up on all suggestions I have the current security setup;

CIS
MBAM (On demand)
Hitman Pro (On demand)
AxCrypt for encryption
KeyScrambler Pro

I still can't decide on a disk imaging program however, elsewhere I have heard great reviews on Acronis True Image. Any opinions on that?

Anything else I should add to my security setup?

 

@Cerburus
You can also take a look at here and here for KeyScrambler.

 

i'm using it. works very well, i like the boot time feature that allow you to go into a WinPE environment to restore your backup without CD/DVD. just a "bad" point is it just add some processes and services that are not really needed, but you can disable them.

 

Yes sandboxie.

 

Maybe you want to reconsider and add Sandboxie,as it's an awesome first layer of defense for the browsers.And you should look at Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 Free http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/index.html if you wanna try another free app.

 

It's good but I don't like it. It's bloated as guest already mentioned. It's also slow compared to other solutions.

If you wanna go for paid apps then first try out the these 3 - Image for Windows from Terabyte Unlimited, Drive Snapshot and Macrium Reflect. Then you'll see the difference.

 

+1 for sandboxie and paragon.