Please suggest to me a good free antivirus program

[Borgholio]

AVG is getting more and more invasive with their popup ads advertising upgrades or warning me that one of my scanning modules is disabled (when I did it on purpose and told it to ignore that module). Their support dept says these popups are necessary and cannot be disabled. Nuts to that. So I want to get rid of it and switch to an AV program that is less annoying than AVG. Any suggestions?

[Ace Pace]

I'm going to go against the internet and go with my own knowledge.

Upgrade to Windows 10. Let your computer auto-update (or make sure you update once a month). Browse using an update to date browser (I don't care which). Use the Windows 10 "SmartScreen" filter to avoid running crap.

After you do all of those, use the built in Windows Defender as an anti-virus, it's currently good enough and will soon be great.


Why?
Windows Defender is the right cross between good enough defense, very few false positives, very little performance impact and no nagging.

[Elheru Aran]

I do have to agree that Microsoft's built in antivirus is pretty reasonable. Fuck Windows 10, but the Microsoft Security Essentials on my W7 machine is doing a decent job so far over the past... ehh... I wanna say 3 years or so.

[Imperial528]

Microsoft Security Essentials functions and is free AND doesn't interfere with Windows itself so I'd recommend that.

...assuming you're using Windows...

[Iroscato]

Avast.

/thread

[Ace Pace]

I do have to agree that Microsoft's built in antivirus is pretty reasonable. Fuck Windows 10, but the Microsoft Security Essentials on my W7 machine is doing a decent job so far over the past... ehh... I wanna say 3 years or so.

If you care about anything on your computer, whether it's pictures, credit card information or just your entertainment, either back them up in a disconnected machine or upgrade to a seriously supported version of Windows.

If we want to be technical for a minute, Windows 7 is on a completly crappy kernel security wise (in modern terms), with little protection against any kiddie exploit. You're still getting security patches but the protection and the support 7 offers for any AV software is pathetic. You can use it but why?

[Borgholio]

So that's three of you who suggest Microsoft's built-in antivirus. Hmm...most reviewer websites like PcMagazine are highly critical of it. They do say good things about Avast though, but I can't argue that Microsoft's AV is definitely low-impact.

[Malagar]

You can use Avast, but you will probably be annoyed by its habit of turning on its email signature every few months.

[bilateralrope]

I've been running Avira for a while. No noticeable performance impact, no ads telling me to pay for the premium version. Last time I checked how well it did at preventing malware it was in the top 3, but that ranking changes from year to year.

[montypython]

Been using Panda antivirus for my slower machines, very light on system resources, no popups and no false alarms.

[TheFeniX]

So that's three of you who suggest Microsoft's built-in antivirus. Hmm...most reviewer websites like PcMagazine are highly critical of it. They do say good things about Avast though, but I can't argue that Microsoft's AV is definitely low-impact.

It's no where near the best, but from reading and my own experience: almost everything has gone to shit lately, even faster if it's popular. AVG used to be a light-weight and unobtrusive AV that might miss some of the newer stuff (like a lot of AV), but now it's a bloated spying shit-pile with a UI that looks designed by and for a 5-year-old. Avast is still pretty good, but has become a bit bloated. I've heard good things about Sophos Free, but I have not tried it. SpyBot hasn't changed much from what I've seen, but Tea Timer has always been trash (they now hide it under "let Spybot manage my everything) and the program does not run nearly as smooth as it used to.

I currently run W10 built-in with Spybot running with none of the bells and whistles and run manual scans. I also use McAfee Site Adviser which is lightweight and wards off bad search results from fucking your PC up. Security Scanner also isn't bad. Their retail AV is garbage though, unless something has changed in the past 15 years. I've got no issues so far.

[Ace Pace]

So that's three of you who suggest Microsoft's built-in antivirus. Hmm...most reviewer websites like PcMagazine are highly critical of it. They do say good things about Avast though, but I can't argue that Microsoft's AV is definitely low-impact.

The difference in any real world ranking is pretty much nil. There's one "uber AV" but it's also annoying as hell, Kaspersky.

As I said in my first reply, proper computer care matters more than your AV. Or any "internet security scanner". Seriously. Just run Chrome or Edge and they all have these safeguards built in.

I'm also incredibly against any "suite" solution. After TavisO over the past few years (and my own knowledge), these things are bug ridden pieces of shit.

[Sea Skimmer]

The best thing to do is to get one of the scripts floating around that simply blocks at the IP level all known ad servers which have hosted malware. That will also block 90% of ads (screw them for not self policing), and will make some streaming video services unusable but otherwise its incredibly effective at protection and its not just low impact, it will probable make your browser run faster since its no longer even trying to load bullshit. An ad block program will not give you the same result, as many of them allow the ads to download but simply block the actual display.

Also set java and flash to only run when allowed, that alone is most of the protection you need these days as long as you don't click on email spam or download PDFs from Russian servers and open them with Adobe.

[Edi]

Avast is practically the last fucking free antivirus software I would ever recommend anyone, right behind Avira and AVG. They're all shit.

Avast gets fairly good protective ratings in different comparisons, but there are several serious downsides:

• Data harvesting (if you're not paying for a service that costs money to produce, then YOU and your information is the product)
• Invasive as fuck with regard to email, downloaded files and others
• FUCKS UP THE WINDOWS TCP/IP STACK! Seriously, when (not if) Avast decides to act up, it's good-fucking-bye all connectivity on your machine until it's nuked with an eraser program. I see this at work at least once a week.

There were other reasons but I forget what they are. Between fucking up TCP/IP, having a piece of shit corrupted firewall and being a fucking data slurper, that's more than enough. Pick your poison but don't say you weren't warned.

Personally I've bitten the bullet and taken a subscription to F-Secure. Instead of paying them 60 euros once per year and having to renew every year, I have it on an ISP license, meaning it's a constant, monthly rate, €6.90 for three devices (Windows/Mac/Android) after I ran out of my 50% off for the first six months. I could get a substantially larger license pool that is cheaper per license for peanuts (15 devices for 9.90 per month for 24 months, then 13.90 after that), but I don't have that many devices. Its impact on performance is negligible (a lot less than MSE, when I had that) and it has superb protection. Parts of it are BitDefender tech combined with F-Secure's own. And it doesn't pull shady shit.

Funny thing about F-Secure is that up until version 9 I couldn't have recommended it for anyone and I would have told people to stay the fuck away from it. Since version 12, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Might have something to do with ow they did a complete engine rebuild on it to change it from a massive resource hog to the fast, lean and efficient thing it is today.

[Borgholio]

I installed Avast on my home PC and I'm in the process of testing it out. So far it seems to be quick and stable, but holy fuck does it come up with a lot of false positives! Initial scan pulled up 54,000 (that's 54 thousand) "viruses". Nearly every single one I looked at was immediately identifiable as harmless and not malware in any way, shape, or form. I'm tweaking the scan sensitivity but if I can't get the false positives down to a reasonable level, I'll just get rid of it and stick with Windows Defender.

[Torben]

So...most malware issues today happen so fast that antivirus companies don't even have time to update their definitions before someone can be exploited. On top of that, most now come in the form of flash, java, or some other plugin exploit that most antivirus won't even see, or they occur because someone clicked a link and installed something...well, the AV won't stop that either. Use Security Essentials (W7) or Defender (8/10), keep your OS updated, use an up to date browser, don't allow the Java web plugin to run, if you have to have it, keep Flash and Adobe Reader up to date, and don't run as admin - create a user level account for your normal daily use. keep the admin account for when you need to install something. That'll stop 99% of anything that could happen.

[TheFeniX]

I installed Avast on my home PC and I'm in the process of testing it out. So far it seems to be quick and stable, but holy fuck does it come up with a lot of false positives! Initial scan pulled up 54,000 (that's 54 thousand) "viruses". Nearly every single one I looked at was immediately identifiable as harmless and not malware in any way, shape, or form. I'm tweaking the scan sensitivity but if I can't get the false positives down to a reasonable level, I'll just get rid of it and stick with Windows Defender.

How many of those are viruses and how many are just tracking cookies and other files in that vein? Spybot pops a load of stuff in my temp and Internet files, most are green bars, which means they aren't damaging to my PC, but I remove them anyway.

[Borgholio]

None are tracking cookies, most are .exe files, zip files, and other stuff that I know for certain is harmless.

[biostem]

Avira is ok, but they switched to this sort of universal App, where you can choose to install specific modules, (antivirus, antispyware, identity protection), but you can choose to only download the components you want.

[Edi]

The big reason to get something with a better engine is that they do not rely only on definitions based identification.

I have no idea of how other programs do it, but F-Secure has a seven layer protection that has the obvious definitions based identification and in addition to that various other checks at different stages that involve monitoring the computer's RAM and its usage among other things. It can recognize even unknown malware as malware in many cases, because in order to be able to do stuff that malware typically does, it must behave in a certain way in the computer's memory and try to access various things it has no business accessing.

All in all, pick whatever you feel comfortable with, but keep in mind that you do get what you pay for.

Regardless of what AV software you end up getting, remember these:

Java has no business being on any regular consumer computer unless explicitly needed for something specific (in which case it usually is not a regular consumer use computer)
Keep browser updated
Keep OS updated
Flash must be set to "ask to activate"
Avoid excessive plugins
Use a good adblocker or the scripts Sea Skimmer suggested

Then the normal safety practices.

[Skywalker_T-65]

I installed Avast on my home PC and I'm in the process of testing it out. So far it seems to be quick and stable, but holy fuck does it come up with a lot of false positives! Initial scan pulled up 54,000 (that's 54 thousand) "viruses". Nearly every single one I looked at was immediately identifiable as harmless and not malware in any way, shape, or form. I'm tweaking the scan sensitivity but if I can't get the false positives down to a reasonable level, I'll just get rid of it and stick with Windows Defender.

I installed it fairly recently myself, and haven't had any false positives. So...it may be the settings? I'm not tech-savvy enough to say for sure though.