QOTD: Is Free Antivirus as Good as Paid Software?

[Guest]

Paid Norton all the way up to 2005. the last good program they released was 2003 versions. 2005 was the beginning of the end. Free alternatives work very good and with many of them out there, you can find the best one that suits your needs. Recommend AVG or Avira for anti-virus and Spybot or Malwarebytes for anti-spyware needs

 

[Shnur]

I had issues with Norton until 2008, then they did something very weird and it ran fine, not good, just fine. As for McAffee, I never got it working while other computers in my home network got bombared by messages saying: AHHH YOUR WHOLE NETWORK IS NOT SECURE WITH MCAFEE BUY MORE LICENSES AND SECURE IT!
That was too much for me to live with, so this is the end story for them.
As for AVG/Avira, tried both, liked them but they had a bit too much feathures for what I need. Been using MSE and that's actually how I fixed my clients computers that couldn't install Kaspersky; they had a virus and the computer kept BSOD. This is where MSE actually installed, scanned and removed the trojan files and got the PC back up and running... Install Kaspersky after, updated, scanned, found NOTHING.
From this point on, I realized two things: payed stuff is not always the best and Microsoft did a GREAT job on this one.

 

[eddieroolz]

Norton and McAffee are malware in themselves. They have no right to say shit about others.

 

[gandalf7777]

as a computer technician, I work on badly infected computers every day, it really does not matter what antivirus people use, if the user clicks on it, you've got it. I cringe when I see the trifecta of evil: expired antivirus, limewire, and myspace IM. We use avg both free and paid, but I clean up infected computers with all flavors of current antivirus's, haven't tried the free microsoft one yet, most have rootkits, my word of advice, don't click on anything.

 

[cruiseoveride]

Did no one make a copy of the video?

 

[Guest]

I've used Norton in the past and like others, I found it slowed the PC unacceptably. I recently dusted off an old computer that had Norton and updated it to the 2009 version. Much better! Never got a virus on a system protected by Norton either.

I normally use the paid version of AVG, but have started switching to the free version. Difference: paid version has more proactive features that integrate into the browser and email software to tell you before you click that it's a bad idea. I think a reasonably prudent person is fine with the free version, but not someone who just clicks on whatever grabs them without thinking.

Based on other comments here, I will try Avira and Avast. Thanks all for your contributions here.

 

[mjello]

Seems to me "AVG free" is actually better than most costly antivirus software. We even switched to AVG in my company. It is offcourse not free for business use, but I consider it one of the best antivirus products out there. Regardless of wether its the free or the paid edition.

The paid edition offcourse has some very nice administrative features for business use, that the free edition dont support.

No wonder symantec doesn't like em.

 

[christop]

My Avast home edition has taken care of me and it's not a resource hog like Norton products.... So I will say yes the free stuff is great and doesn't bog down my machine...

 

[techguy911]

I am a tech and own a computer store i can tell you from experience that Norton has lower detection and real time protection rate than Avira out of all the free antivirus out there it has the highest detection rate both real time and scan.

Also just having an AV is not enough while it can protect from certain threats more malware have root kits than ever before.

Having av will not help in this case because root kits hide from av's installing threatfire + free av is better than any pay protection can offer not only does it protect from zero day attacks but it also foils key loggers and prevents rootkit intrusion.

I spent years testing various free combinations using a virtual environment and surfing to sites loaded with viruses,malware and worms.

Symantec home av have no/very poor root kit detection they have fallen behind current threats there are many free alternates out there that do a better job.

I do not carry Norton av in my store due to fact that it is a resource hog and kaspersky 2010 does a much better job, i have yet to see an infected machine with kaspersky 2010 on it show up.

I clean on average 10 machines a day in my shop more and more root kits show up from rogue av's many people fall for the tricks they use to get you to buy them if in doubt NEVER click on something that pops up saying you have viruses while surfing the web.

Facebook is were most malware, viruses and worms are now showing up you have to be careful when surfing social networking sites, alot of those games will get you infected or clicking on unknown links in msn or any other chat will also get you infected.

Best free combo out there for safe surfing is:
Firefox 3.5 + noscript+ WOT.
Avira + Threatfire.

I am doing tesing on microsofts new free security software and will see how it stacks up other free alternatives.

My current ratings on free av:

1. Avira
2. Avast
3. Avg

Root kit/malware realtime detection:

1. Threatfire +your AV
2. GeSWall+ Your AV
3. spywareterminator with no AV installed or don't install clamwin in package+your AV.

 

[j_chatelain]

Norton feels like a virus in itself sometimes. Every tried to uninstall it completely? Way to much work.

 

[tleavit]

We had a pc on the network with spyware that our corp Symantec found 4 instances of. Symantec would not clean it. I told my NA to install the Microsoft MSE and we found that it fond the same 4 instances and it cleaned them. Any corp user of Symantec who has to use their central manged software knows how really sheety it can be. I may be switching to MSE in Jan (when $10K in yearly licensing is due) after some serious tests.

 

[jsc]

In short, yes.

The British PC magazines regularly compare free and paid anti-virus software. Some of the free stuff does quite well.

 

[jacinclowe]

sorry all but if you look at the charts for all the different antiviruses and suites you would find that eset nod32 is at or near the top of all of them just google antivirus charts avast was nice free for a while but when i found eset it just blew everything away its not bloated its always running and you would never even know even on a old slow system and it the full suite has firewall antivirus and realtime scanner and antispyware.

 

[mlopinto2k1]

I use NOD32 and swear by it but I must say that Avast!'s Home Edition never gave me ONE problem. I am a FREAK about keeping my computer clean. I have reinstalled Windows at least 100 times just for making sure my install was clean if I decided to run something or get curious. I know I should probably get a secondary machine to do this because it certainly is slightly foolish (oxymoron).

Anyway, I tried Microsofts Security Essentials and I got "curious" with some files and it nailed me. So, for me, no, it sucks. NOD32 of Avast! always come through.

 

[mcp20366]

The days of nostalgic virii are long gone. Where a wizzkid (angry or not) designed a virus and unleashed it onto the community.

I believe that nowadays most virii are the works of corporate incentives to keep the online community buying updates and software.
In this regard I think that malware, spyware, virii and all malignant programs should all be designated as criminal. And prosecution, how difficult it is, should be a high priority.

As for free versus paid. I do believe that paid services will get better achievements. But will also attract criminals who will hunt for benefits.

I sincerely believe that an honest person with good health, sane mind, proper education, angelic morale and high intelligence should code programs. But of course there are tons of insecure, tainted, damaged but highly intelligent persons out there who are capable of producing excellent output in code on a paid basis. Big money attracts big crooks. You know who you are...
And I don't trust them.
So one can not ever be sure.

I've used Avira for all my family's pc's. And it suffices. Because all other commercial anti-virus will NOT actively protect against getting data from the internet with permission. Be it via messenger transference or download channels. Some say NOD32 does, as do others using heuristic detections. All I can say out of experience that I've been infected whilst running Norton2005, Norton2006, McAfee2007.

The only technique I'm thinking of is SandBoxing. But that is only possible on fast machines with decent specs. And it would require proper support from the OS as well.

As of 2008 I'm using BitDefender Suite. It does all it needs to do. Haven't been infected since. But then again, I'm experienced in surfing now and won't click on flashy banners, pop-ups etc.

Still, isn't it wonderful how much information and data there is to be enjoyed on the internet? Knowing that there are a lot of shady people running things behind the scenes...

Be sensible, be safe.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I would go back further. Back "in the day" when Compuserve was the main thing, our sysop rules dictated that all files uploaded to forum libraries had to be scanned with at least 2 AV programs. We were provided with a free copy of F-Prot to augment our own AV programs. Never one to put all my eggs in one basket, I had split my machines between McAfee and Norton. But AnnaK blew right by Norton and those machines were infected however F-Prot removed them in it's nightly scan

F-Prot falls in the middle as it can be downloaded for free but can't be upgraded w/o a purchased license after 30 days. Big whoop. It costs like $29 for 5 PC's. Right now I use ZoneAlarm w/ it's build in Kapersky AV and AM as my active scanner and still let F-Prot run and scan the entire network nightly. And no, the mantra about not running to AV programs is a warning promoted by the uninformed. As long as only one acts as an "active" scanner, there's absolutely no issue, assuming of course none of them are McAfee / Norton. Those two lost their relevance when they began focusing primarily on whether your license was up to date than on whether they were improving the customer's experience.

 

[omnimodis78]

I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials and I'm OK with it. I have used Norton, McAfee, free Avast, and BitDefender (GameSafe). Out of all of these BitDefender was my favourite, but it's not fully Windows 7 x64 compatible so I had to ditch it. So I decided to use MSE which is just fine for me and so far it's been good to me, though that's a matter of perception for the most part.

 

[Guest]

I do in shop repair work at a local shop and the one constant thing I've found is that it doesn't really matter what antivirus anyone has installed, I think I've seen every single one massively infected. More common is a fake antivirus infection (Pc Cleaner 2009, Windows Antivirus 2009, Personal Antivirus 2008, whatever). These are almost always so intrusive they make the computer useless and antivirus software generally sits there and watches it happen, no matter what it is. Several times on the first page of comments I've seen some paraphrase of "common sense will do you more good than any of them" and that's really the only answer. If you know what you're doing then any free antivirus will probably be more than you need and any paid antivirus is likely 50 bucks a year you could have saved.

 

[iLLz]

[citation][nom]thearm[/nom]I'd like to see some testing on this topic. I wouldn't trust people on the net (nor myself) to make this kind of judgement.[/citation]

Go here: http://www.av-comparatives.org/

They test a range of Antivirus software and rate them based on a multitude of issues. They have On Demand results as well as proactive results. Avira usually ranks best so check it out

 

[rodney_ws]

My employer uses McAfee AV software on our 300+ desktops and it is a absolute resource hog. P4 3.0 GHz 512 MB desktops are rendered useless while the software updates. It is not uncommon to see 300+ MB of RAM being utilized during an update. While the software meets our needs, it unfortunately also drives hardware purchases as well. AV software is easily our most processor/memory intensive application.

At home my free AVG works well and is not intrusive. I suspect more of the same from the Microsoft offering.

 

[WR2]

AVG Free and Windows Defender are getting the job done for me.

 

[Abydosone]

Every PC that I have had to clean up from infections had some version of AVG or Avast installed. Most of the computers were completely unusable and AVG did nothing to clean off the infections and malware. Now I have never had to clean up a PC that came in with Norton installed. It does its job, and the 2009 versions are pretty light weight, weighing in at about 30mb average for both processes. That is nothing considering every machine should have at least 2GB of ram these days. Most of those machines had hardware failure anyways.

So for those who are knocking Norton, you probably do not know enough about security to make a clear judgment, nor do you know how to tune your PC to use Norton efficiently.

 

[Abydosone]

Every PC that I have had to clean up from infections had some version of AVG or Avast installed. Most of the computers were completely unusable and AVG did nothing to clean off the infections and malware. Now I have never had to clean up a PC that came in with Norton installed. It does its job, and the 2009 versions are pretty light weight, weighing in at about 30mb average for both processes. That is nothing considering every machine should have at least 2GB of ram these days. Most of those machines had hardware failure anyways.

So for those who are knocking Norton, you probably do not know enough about security to make a clear judgment, nor do you know how to tune your PC to use Norton efficiently.

 

[beckstrom12]

I am currently using the RC of Win 7, I just downloaded the technical preview of Kasperky, I love it my computer has never had any problems with viruses, the only complaint is it can be a little too protective by thinking that my game .exe files are trojans, its kind of funny but really easy to fix. I think that from now on I will stick with Kasperky.

 

[Abydosone]

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