Advice on a decent free AV?

[raixel]

Alright, so long story short, yesterday I had to wipe my HD due to data corruption(entirely my own fault. Power surges on booting/updating = BAD), and reinstall Windows. Its not that big of a deal cuz this comps only been running for 2 months and most of the important stuff was backed up, therefore I was like "I could screw around and try and save it while being computerless, or just wipe it and restart". I learned my lesson during my major system meltdown last year when I lost *everything*.

Part of this was I just lost my huge abandonware collection I was in the process of rebuilding, I know quite a few decent sites, but dont want to go there without a decent AV/malware detector. Not that I dont trust em, but hey.

So Ive got a brand spanking new install. Now I need a decent AV. I was using AVG free for two years, but the last version I had (2011) has become total bloat-ware and I really didnt like it. It ran something like literally 10 different processes at a time and had a horrible habit of just eating up system resources compared to earlier versions. Although this really didnt faze my comp much, it still annoyed me cuz I like to run a really clean, efficient system. And from what I hear the 2012 release is even worse. I always run Malwarebytes free too, but havent used the latest version. Does anyone use it?

So I want to try something different, as my more processor/vid card heavy games would bog sometimes cuz AVG would be running in the background and I had to turn off. Any ideas?

[beowuuf]

If you have win 7 microsoft have their own security essentials you can get for free. I've used that, not had any issues with it in terms of speed. Of course, it might have been doing nothing and i have tons of malware.

And that explains my bad typing..... <.<
>.>
O.O

[linflas]

I've been using Avast for years and I'm very happy with it. Win Defender is included into WIN 7 so no anti-spyware is needed.

[Jan]

I use Comodo. Don't ask me if it's good or bad - it's just that my brother told me to use it so I'm using it.

[Gambit37]

I buy mine. I must be mad. But it's very good: NOD32 from Eset.

[raixel]

Cool, thanks for all the help. I'll take all this into consideration. *goes off to research*

And is it just me, or does "comodo" make you think of a toilet? I had to read that again, going "wait theres an AV called commode out there?" Personally, I think a great ad campaign would be "flush those viruses, with comodo!"

[Jan]

Well, in Czech "komoda" usually means a small cupboard, so no hygienic connections here.

[Joramun]

I use avira antivir. Nice once you find the way to disable the ad pop-ups.
Avast is fine, as is Komodo.

[raixel]

So after a few days of research, I went with Avast at the end. I was tempted by Avira but heard some really bad stuff about forced toolbars, popups and them promoting a kind of shady company (uniblue).

The only issue Im having now is every time I get home from work and go to my comp, I get a pop up and voice saying my virus defs are out of date. About every 12 hours! Seriously. WTF. It seems good so far, but I havent done anything that would make me wonder yet.

[Gambit37]

Pretty much all good AV software will update daily or even more frequently. That's a good thing.

[raixel]

Hm, *looks around to see if theres a way to make it update without announcing it constantly*. I dont mind it updating, just dont want a giant pop up and voice everytime it happens.

Does anyone who runs this know how to set it to do a full scan at a set time, like every three days or once a week? I know some free AVs wont do an autoscan, only their paid versions.

[linflas]

You can shut down all sounds in Avast preferences, as I did. But I prefer having the green popup displayed.
Most of Avast options are quite intuitive, I managed to have a scan only once per month.

[raixel]

Yeah, found it. The issue I had was it was checking for updates every 150 minutes. So I set it for once every other day and had it auto update so that it didnt go "your virus defs are out of date, allow update" constantly. And it does a full scan once a week.

nterestingly, it has already blocked a few potentially shady scripts/pages on websites when I was searching around for some abandonware yesterday. I like the pop-up it uses as it catches your attention but doesnt impede you if you really want to go there, as opposed to AVG which was embedded into the browser and tried to force you to use its search engine constantly and if it didnt like a site, it just wouldnt let you in(at least the latest version). I'm still trying to find a way to get avast to tell me what it doesnt like about the site though, all I can get to do is take me to a page where it wants me to upgrade and has a general message about "You were blocked from a potentialweb-threat recently" without telling me in computer knowledgeable terms what the threat was. Anyone know if this option is available in the free version?

Only major issue I had was that it didnt like Steam and it kept on trying to run Steam and the games Steam was launching in its sandbox, thereby annoying me severely as I couldnt launch my games until I figured out how to put Steam on its "ok" list permanently.

But overall, great AV and Id recommend it to anyone. Its got a decently small system footprint and seems to have pretty good detection rates. I am thinking of buying the full version to support it.