Antivirus Guide & User Reviews.
AcceleratorX
Youngling
Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free edition is another free antimalware alternative. It now uses VIPRE engine and is not bad detection wise. Whether the features on offer are to your liking is another story 
Ad-Aware Free - Download Internet Security Software with Antivirus & Spyware Removal - Lavasoft
Ad-Aware Free - Download Internet Security Software with Antivirus & Spyware Removal - Lavasoft
finally it gets updated after 2 days.
ratul
█████████████████
Agree with this...
For me, Kaspersky has always worked best since 2007, Avast AVG are good for free, but i still don't know how they score so high..
My college have both AVG and avast installed on systems, updated, and all those systems are full of viruses, delete them and they again creep into the system through network, avast internet security does'nt even detect it until it's already into the system..
I had installed kaspersky on my pc there, and no virus had ever penetrated my college system in 3 years, so always safe..
ESET has good detection rate and main advantage is that it's light on resources, so it's a good alternative too..
Also i have personally tested all the big brands in antiviruses in a fully infected VM running winXP SP3, and have found that bitdefender, kaspersky have the best repairability rates, no file has gone corrupted while repairing and above 95% of files were repaired in the first scan itself ..
AVG deleted (quarantined) the system files itself instead of repairing it (notepad, defrag, wordpad and others were gone), same was with avast, avira too much false positives, eset was able to detect but able to repair just about 70% of them..
Norton was too heavy while repairing, and false positives were high compared to kaspersky..
In the end, bitdefender was a little buggy with the system, so kaspersky was the winner in my small test, though it took a very long time in scanning..
AcceleratorX
Youngling
Personal experience will always differ from tests; because each scenario is different. My experience is very unlike yours. For example, I put AVG Internet Security on my brother's laptop and he goes through university with loads of malware on each PC and each pen drive, some of them fresh off the internet and the PC still hasn't been infected as AVG caught them all.
On my own PC I have used nearly all the bigwigs and settled on PC Tools - light, fast, cheap, detects and repairs well. But tests will show it to be average at best. I have come across zero-day threats and seen these products do well. That's how it is. As far as free goes, I recommend only Avast, AVIRA or ZoneAlarm. Each guy's experience is different; but I have come across literally hundreds of zero day threats over the years and in general what I have seen is consistent with the results in AV-comparatives and AV-test (with few exceptions - some days some AV scores less so it's not exactly the same "order" as in those tests but pretty similar).
EDIT: I do know some vendors in the past "optimized" for specific tests by adding large amounts of samples to the database near the period when testing occurs. This might explain why some of you find some AVs not so good in the real world compared to what tests say
On my own PC I have used nearly all the bigwigs and settled on PC Tools - light, fast, cheap, detects and repairs well. But tests will show it to be average at best. I have come across zero-day threats and seen these products do well. That's how it is. As far as free goes, I recommend only Avast, AVIRA or ZoneAlarm. Each guy's experience is different; but I have come across literally hundreds of zero day threats over the years and in general what I have seen is consistent with the results in AV-comparatives and AV-test (with few exceptions - some days some AV scores less so it's not exactly the same "order" as in those tests but pretty similar).
EDIT: I do know some vendors in the past "optimized" for specific tests by adding large amounts of samples to the database near the period when testing occurs. This might explain why some of you find some AVs not so good in the real world compared to what tests say
coderunknown
Retired Forum Mod
i tried and it always is a miss. detects nothing other than harmless cookies. MBAM still holds top spot.
Installed and updated it - the update files are the smallest for this kind of apps I've ever seen - only around ~350KBs - anyway, ran a quick scan and though I've more than 1500 bookmarks for opera it only scanned through IE 10's bookmark and marked one harmless bookmark as malicious one. Uninstalled it.
coderunknown
Retired Forum Mod
database was out of date or that particular virus was yet to be added to roboscan database.
I am using Kaspersky for last 5/6 years, ever since it became available. At Rs. 750/- for 3 users (250 effecting for one), its really affordable software for Indian mentality and works really great.
Off late, for home usage, Microsoft Security Essential is just working fine..
Off late, for home usage, Microsoft Security Essential is just working fine..
^+1 for ESET SS5.
AcceleratorX
Youngling
The SymSilent tool is just a small program that sends reports as to whether Norton is installed and what AV product you are currently using, for Symantec's survey purposes. Nothing more sinister than that, and it's present only on a few HP laptops AFAIK which come bundled with Norton. It wasn't on my Pavilion DV6 though, and AFAIK doesn't come with retail copies of Norton.
If you wish to avoid Symantec's constant server contacting, you can just use PC Tools which is a no-nonsense, simple security software compared to Norton.
If you wish to avoid Symantec's constant server contacting, you can just use PC Tools which is a no-nonsense, simple security software compared to Norton.
