Best free Anti-virus/Firewall pairing?(XP)

[Mr Bean]

Well my free year old subscription to Zone-alarm has expired, as had my free two year subscription to Mcafee from my Navy days. I'm now vulnerable to new virus attacks so I need protection. What good free-ware is out there for me to switch to?

Keep in mind I have Windows XP and don't intend to go to anything else for at least another two years.

[Bounty]

AVG for antivirus, without a doubt; it's free and it works great. Paid AVs may offer slightly better protection but it hasn't failed me yet.

As for a firewall, I hear the built-in Windows (post-SP2) one does a good job these days.

[charlemagne]

I second AVG, and for firewall I'm using Sygate Personal Firewall for years now, and it does a fine job at pointing you to all programs trying to "phone home" and access the internet. It also mentions when a program was changed since you've last used it, which of course is ok when you updated something, but it's also helpful against certain trojans and the like. You can set permissions for each program seperatly.

[Edi]

Avira is the best free AV program I've seen. It beat both Avast and AVG in a recent test here in Finland. Sygate Personal Firewall is a fairly good program. ZA sucks shit. Comodo is a very powerful firewall, but it's advanced user only. You will get precisely nowhere without reading the manual first (still on my own to-do list, that), but it should be the best free one out there once you do.

[charlemagne]

Avira is the best free AV program I've seen.

Funny, I just realised by hovering the cursor over the icon in my task bar that I indeed am running Avira, not AVG, so I second you, not Bounty

[phongn]

You don't need any other firewall save the one included in SP2 or later. If you insist on having one, Comodo is probably the best of the free ones.

Avira is the best free antivirus (despite being nagware, but there are ways around that) and NOD32 is my current favorite for non-free antivirus software. There are some indications that Norton Antivirus 2009 is actually a solid product as well(!)

[Enigma]

You don't need any other firewall save the one included in SP2 or later. If you insist on having one, Comodo is probably the best of the free ones.

Avira is the best free antivirus (despite being nagware, but there are ways around that) and NOD32 is my current favorite for non-free antivirus software. There are some indications that Norton Antivirus 2009 is actually a solid product as well(!)

Though I like AVG, I'm going to give Avira a shot. Does Avira have something like AVG's Resident Shield? Can it be easily disabled?

[charlemagne]

You don't need any other firewall save the one included in SP2 or later. If you insist on having one, Comodo is probably the best of the free ones.

The windows firewall won't warn me whenever a program wants to access the internet, I like being asked about that, because I hate it when update services or other stuff goes rogue and starts downloading, and stuff like that.

[Ariphaos]

AVG for antivirus, without a doubt; it's free and it works great. Paid AVs may offer slightly better protection but it hasn't failed me yet.

AVG is the broken condom of free antivirus providers.

http://www.free-av.com/ <- Get Avira

Beats it hands down, on all metrics.

The windows firewall won't warn me whenever a program wants to access the internet, I like being asked about that, because I hate it when update services or other stuff goes rogue and starts downloading, and stuff like that.

It will if you keep track of your firewall exception settings. Just turn off or delete the exceptions you don't care for.

[Bounty]

AVG is the broken condom of free antivirus providers.

Are you serious, or is this a "hur hur my niche product is better" thing? Last I checked AVG wasn't perfect, but it got the job done; I'm not going to fall over a 2% difference in detection rates when I don't have to deal with nag screens.

[phongn]

Though I like AVG, I'm going to give Avira a shot. Does Avira have something like AVG's Resident Shield? Can it be easily disabled?

Virtually all virus scanners have something similar and they usually can be disabled (for example, if you prefer to run a nightly scan instead of paying the CPU and I/O penalty of a realtime scanner).

The windows firewall won't warn me whenever a program wants to access the internet, I like being asked about that, because I hate it when update services or other stuff goes rogue and starts downloading, and stuff like that.

If you have malicious software on your computer, it'll probably attack known personal firewalls anyways and disable them. Vista's firewall also does outbound scanning.

Are you serious, or is this a "hur hur my niche product is better" thing? Last I checked AVG wasn't perfect, but it got the job done; I'm not going to fall over a 2% difference in detection rates when I don't have to deal with nag screens.

AV-Comparatives does not rate AVG particularly highly in their controlled tests. However, Avira does have a very high false-positive rate.

[Enigma]

Though I like AVG, I'm going to give Avira a shot. Does Avira have something like AVG's Resident Shield? Can it be easily disabled?

Virtually all virus scanners have something similar and they usually can be disabled (for example, if you prefer to run a nightly scan instead of paying the CPU and I/O penalty of a realtime scanner).

I mean in AVG, Resident Shield (I think) constantly monitors your computer (thus slowing it down) and is always working in the background. It can't be disabled from the control panel even though the option is there. Disabling it from Task Manager doesn't work because every time you remove it, it would turn itself back on. It pissed me off to no end until I found the solution thanks to Google. Though it did mess up AVG.

[Bounty]

AV-Comparatives does not rate AVG particularly highly in their controlled tests. However, Avira does have a very high false-positive rate.

?

"Advanced+" rating with a detection rate <2% from Avira's. or am I reading the tables wrong?

[phongn]

There are pairs of tests - you should read both.

[Bounty]

There are pairs of tests - you should read both.

Right, I misread "retroactive", thought it was just an update rather than a different test. Those are... more damning.

[Mr Bean]

Ok so I get Aviria, I got AVG in the mean time. So I'm swapping virus scanners.

But why oh Why is phongn telling me to trust Microsoft free ware firewall. Vista I understand since the free-firewall is tied into the operating system, but XP? Seriously?

I need a second opinion on the firewall.

[phongn]

I mean in AVG, Resident Shield (I think) constantly monitors your computer (thus slowing it down) and is always working in the background. It can't be disabled from the control panel even though the option is there. Disabling it from Task Manager doesn't work because every time you remove it, it would turn itself back on. It pissed me off to no end until I found the solution thanks to Google. Though it did mess up AVG.

Avira (and most other AV scanners) will let you disable the online scanner.

But why oh Why is phongn telling me to trust Microsoft free ware firewall. Vista I understand since the free-firewall is tied into the operating system, but XP? Seriously?

The XP SP2 firewall works well, that's why. If you insist on outbound filtering, I even gave a suggestion.