Free Anti-virus Software?

Anyone know of and can suggest some GOOD Anti-virus software that is download-able and also free?

AVG Free

Might as well download the AV prog you want with any of the 20 million torrent sites. none of the free ones is good enough imo, even when they dont find anything, if you scan your computer with one that isnt free it can find something that the free one didnt. just my 2 cents.

AVG; Its lightweight and free(Well, they have a free and a paid for version). It works well if your not getting too dirty, but if you are, your better off buying Bitdefender or torrenting it. Thats a really amazing anti-virus I find.

AVAST Anti-Virus, free registration, free updates for an entire year. Catches everything from hazardous links, to full-out hack attacks.

The one and only for me is Kaspersky, great program and does not slow down your computer. You can just download the 30 day trial and try it out.

Futureshop every so often has the 3 PC Kaspersky Internet Security version on sale.

In the past I had relied on AVG Free / "Avast". Tried Kerpesky as well.. However I noticed these A/Vs was using too much of my free resources. Im running an AMD Athlon XP 3200 (barton) and even it seemed a little laggy under avg/avast/kerps. Norton is simply a joke and will hog all of your resources until you are dragging along with windows "Wiping themselves away" mouse-locks, all that fun stuff.

Since then I have been using something called "Comodo Firewall".. which also has antivirus/defense built in. I have been using this in combination with Ad aware "AdWatch Live!". My job requires me to use a secure computer. I have willingly loaded on viruses, and trojans to test against this security and it is top notch, NOTHING has made it past my "phalanx" of antivirus. Comodo / AV Live watches -every- change in the system, every program launched, even every TCP/UDP Packet sent/recieved. My favorite thing is they both use -minimal- CPU/RAM in the background. Even with these two programs vs 1 AVG etc, I have noticed a large speed difference. i fully recommend these two programs.

The top 3 thrown around are generally always Avast! anti-virus, Avira and AVG Free. I'll try to give you a little break-down of where each has its' strengths and weaknesses.

http://free.avg.com/ - AVG: The current release is version 8.5, and ever since version 8.0+ people have complained that this particular program has become bloated and sluggish compared to its old performance. I can't speak to this issue as I've never tried it at length, but outside of those problems AVG was a fan-favorite for a very long time for dependable performance.

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html - Avast!: Avast I feel for most people is the best choice in general unless a light-weight footprint is important for you, in a case such as an old computer, laptop or netbook. A downside to this program is that while scans are very thorough, they take a very long time as well. I used it for a very long time and it's been touted as one of the best, but over time I found myself having to turn it off during gaming or anything processor-intensive. Still, very solid and I still choose this over others on my desktop PCs for myself and family/friends.

http://www.free-av.com/ - Avira: For Avira, I'd label it as the happy medium between performance, speed of scan and light-weight operation. This is what I ended up using after needing to change from Avast and have been happy so far. Scan time length is manageable and memory footprint is unnoticeable for me. I can't speak to virus detection yet, but many other reviews exist on the internet for this purpose anyway, and the reviews are generally very good. The one downside to this program is it pops up a huge ad each time it updates, but a quick google search will show you how to disable this.

Good luck. D;

Also, Avira's file scanner is called "Luke Filewalker." No question. /nod

Ya, that makes me LMAO.

I have tried AVG. I run Avira and TrendMicro on my computer. I liked TrendMicro so much I bought a subscription. They have a free 3month trial version as well as a "housecall" which is a free Web-based tool designed to scan your PC for a wide range of Internet security threats.It also detects system vulnerabilities and provides a link so you can easily download missing security patches. After each scan, HouseCall delivers a detailed report, which identifies security threats detected on your computer.

Spybot SD works nice too but I had to take it off since it conflicted with another Vista program I ran.

TrendMicro

I've been using AVG free for a couple years now; no complaints personally. I've also heard some recent complaints about AVG getting a little bloated recently, but my previous AV was Norton Internet Security, so compared to that, anything is light weight by comparison lol

Ugh. Norton is such a *(*(^#$^(*&!!! I called their tech support and no lie, I was transferred to India... TWICE!!

Second to Norton is McAffee..both gave me headaches.

lol, I tried it even after the rumors and didn't find it all that bad. More or less on par with Avast! in terms of footprint, which I liked best overall when the memory wasn't an issue. Unless you're on a laptop or fairly old PC, I wouldn't think either would be a problem.

Top three for completely free are AVG, Avast, and AntiVir. Other than that you gotta pay. Kaspersky has an online scanner that seems to catch stuff anything else doesn't. I use McAfee and it's not too bad to pay for. Usually it's best to get a solid anti-virus, scan once a week with kasersky and manually remove what it finds, and also download Spybot search and Destroy from www.safer-networking.org. It's anti ad-ware and spyware but catches a lot of stuff. Also the they have forums there to help you remove any nasties you may catch.