Do you use : No Antivirus , FREE Antivirus , or PAID Antivirus and why?

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SumTingW0ng

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I used Bitdefender Free for more than 4 months, and so far I like it.

---Pros----

No ads

No pop up

No belt and whistle stuff

Easy to use

Install and forget

Good signature protection and zero day protection

Active Threat Control will protect you from exploit and keylogger as well, not just zero day malware.

---Cons---

No way to manual check for update

No manual add exclusions

No Anti-Ransomware

Moderate RAM and CPU Usage which is not good if you running an older system like 2004 PC

Online Forum Technical Support literary doesn't exist at all

 

Ben Harley

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Bit defender is good but it slows your machine like anything.
 

SumTingW0ng

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Only if you are using ~2005 PC with 2GB of RAM than of course.
 

Ben Harley

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Nope. It eats your ram like anything. my office pc's are using it and it slows them down insanely.

8 GB RAM, i5 3rd 3.00 Ghz.
 

SumTingW0ng

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Suck to hear that on your side, but on my side even with a low end gaming laptop with duo core i5 7th gen, 8GB DDR4, 128GB M2 SSD, and GTX 950M with Bitdefender Free doesn't feel any slow down at all.
 

Smagjus

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I stopped using real time anti virus solutions altogether when I noticed that I spend way too much time dealing with problems caused by them. Even Defender is manually turned off because of a bug that exists since Windows 7.

What I do instead is creating regular backups which are protected against unwanted writes, keeping an eye on system resources especially processes, testing untrusted programs in VMs and running a Malwarebytes scan once a month. Works surprisingly well and time efficient for me.

In the future I might give Bitdefender a try though as it is one of a few solutions that didn't fail me directly or indirectly.
 

kiercepin

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Paid AntiVirus of course. Free isn't bad. But only 1 month free trail and then don't serve well. So paid one is better I think.
 

SumTingW0ng

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There are some free that performs similar to the paid version. For instance, Avast Free just as good as Avast Pro or Internet Security. The reason you want to get the paid version is if you need those belt and whistle candy stuff that the company offer.
 

Adam11

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I used avast free version a few years back, and it did ok. Nowadays I do not use any since I realized that viruses won't just infect the system when you visit a suspicios website or receive a mail containing a malicious software. You have to manually run it to infect your system and I learned to recognize potencial malwares over the years.
When I install a pc for a friend who is "less advanced" user, then I install a free avast for them.
 

santiano

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I prefer to use paid antivirus instead of free antivirus as it possesses with advanced layer of protection and have the better features than free one. So I recommend to go for the paid one.
 

santiano

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Well, I had earlier used the free one but it was not up to the mark because of the less features as compared to paid one. So, I switched to paid one. For more security of your valuable data.
 
The best AV is your brain. Don't download suspicious stuff and you wont get viruses.
I personally only use the one that comes with windows on my own pc and malwarebytes for removing viruses out of infected pcs.
 

SumTingW0ng

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True, but with CCleaner incident, we still need antivirus.
 


This is exactly what I read from an authoritative source - Ask Leo website.
 

SumTingW0ng

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Yeah, that remind me of Equifax security site got compromised and redirected user to a fake Adobe Flash update.
 

Dark Lord of Tech

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Good point , even legit sites get compromised.
 

leigh76

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I used AVG Free for yeeeeeears...... recently its changed and gone downhill i think.

Whatever people choose.......itll never be 100% perfect and should never really be used without for example MalwareBytes or similar.......

IMO
 

Ben Harley

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Go for paid one guys. If you guys are reading malware and ransomware attacks, free ones does not stops the attack, their features are limited. Get a paid one. There are a lot of tutorial videos on youtube with paid anti virus services.
 

SumTingW0ng

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Actually no. Free product can perform good as a paid product such as Avast Free for instance. You can strength your security with anti-exe app such as VoodooShield Free that will lock down your PC for good.

Free product can stop the attack if it have signature for it and behavior blocker. As matter of fact, Avast Free can stop the ransomware attack with its new behavior blocker modules.
 

Ben Harley

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I won't agree with you because a lot of my office and neighborhood peeps were telling me that they have Avast, AVG and other free tools for protection against KRACK, Duhk and bad rabbit, but none of them were capable enough to survive the infection. Result, they lost a lot of files. I had a paid service and it blocked all the malicious attacks. Free one does not guarantee a safety.

All those people were handling e-commerce websites (office colleagues) and have a little e-stores business (neighbors).

 
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