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Thread: best free anti virus software?

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    best free anti virus software?

    does anyone know of any decent free anti virus software?

    thanks in advance for responses

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    righty.

    have a look at all the other anti-virus threads, they all end up the same way.

    personally i reccomend Avast!
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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    http://www.avast.com/

    http://free.avg.com/

    are the main two free ones, both are pretty good, but when you can get Kaspersky (the best imo) for £12 for 3 PC licences why not get that?

    Its even free if your a barclays customer:

    http://forums.hexus.net/current-barg...-barclays.html

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I really like AVG definetly download that one.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I tried AVG (well the rebadged Steganos version) on my PC but the updating annoyed me as it wasn't silent and had a tendency to kick me to desktop when playing games under Vista.

    I ended up swapping to the Kaspersky deal Tigerboyce mentions as previously Steganos had been a cheaper rebadged Kaspersky that i was happy with.
    Generally it just works in a non-intrusive way.

    I can't talk for Avast but the free AVG is a cut down product not allowing you to schedule full scans but i guess it comes down to what you want from a Virus scanner

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    Avira Antivir. Very good at detection and has a very small footprint. A popup nag screen happens during DAT file updates but, other than that, it doesn't take over your system like some other AV programs do.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I prefer Avast. I often build PC's for friends and I always install Avast, Online Armour and CCleaner for free anti-virus, firewall and anti-crapware solutions.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I went from AVG to Avast after reading some reviews and comparisons. Haven't found the need to move since.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I'm using Avira. I read that it is pretty quick and comprehensive.

    I'm quite happy so far, been about a month.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mathonar View Post
    I can't talk for Avast but the free AVG is a cut down product not allowing you to schedule full scans but i guess it comes down to what you want from a Virus scanner
    Been using AVG for years now, haven't found any reason at all to change.... the latest two versions do let you schedule full scans, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to..... not sure about earlier versions though as I never had any need to until i changed my OS drive to raptor. the noise was a bit irritating after awhile, so now got it scanning when i'm asleep

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I recommend Avast free to everyone. I've been using it for almost a year a now and haven't had a single problem with it

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    Another vote for Avast. I used it for years with no problems at all.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    If you're after non-instrusive and small footprint I'd always go for NOD32. It's a great program that I've never had any problems with.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    If yo bank with Barclays you can get the 3 licence version of Kapersky for free. I think Scan also sell it for about £12 or so.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    I've been running Avast for around 2-3 years now on a number of PCs.
    Can't say I'd want to use anything else now.

    I did have Symantec AV for a while under free licences but that was from work and it was just awful (corporate edition seems to work much better then public one).

    The only downside to Avast I find is it's annaul (re)registration - not an issue for 1 or 2 PCs, but when yo have to do it for a dozen it becomes anoying.

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    Re: best free anti virus software?

    re: AVG, I was reading about its link scanner in a post from the owner of www.thedvdforums.com
    The main body of which is...
    As of Version 8, AVG has introduced a 'Link Scanner' - this software takes all of the links it finds and fires off requests via the internet to download these pages even if you're not going to visit them. It then scans the traffic and informs you if there are any risks. In theory, this is good, in practice and implementation it is actually very very bad and introduces some severe security issues.

    The problems:

    1. It's easy to detect if AVG is prefetching a page, this means that malicious sites can actually redirect the AVG requests to a clean page that contains no malware. As a result AVG will report that the page is safe and allow you to click through to it - when in fact all it saw was a dummy page and the real page could be infected with many many exploits

    2. It downloads every page that is linked to, anywhere. This could link your IP address to any kind of website - including child pornography etc, even if you don't click on it directly. By prefetching the page, AVG will link your IP address to viewing that site which in turn could land you in a lot of trouble.

    3. It wastes bandwidth for users - if you're on a limited bandwidth package, the last thing you want is your virus checker scanning pages that you have no intention of visiting.

    4. It wastes bandwidth and creates fake DoS attacks on websites. I spent a number of days trying to track down the cause of server issues on CD Times - finally with Kryten's help we managed to determine that it was AVG creating what amounts to a DoS attack from multiple zombie machines. The software had hit upon a custom 404 page and in the period of 1 month I have had millions of requests - hundreds of thousands per day - for a page that doesn't even exist. The frequency of these requests resulted in the server becoming unstable and caused the site's monthly bandwidth use to increase by more than 20 times.

    5. It ruins website statistics - with so many fake requests from computers that weren't going to visit a page in the first place, log file statistics are effectively useless. The impact of this is going to be felt widely for any site that appears in any search engine.
    What do you guys think?

    I was just looking at which are the best free AVs at the mo when I remembered the posting and thought I'd give it a wider audience.
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