Which Free Antivirus Should You Choose ?

A long time ago, Norton Antivirus was the norm and like everyone else I bought a copy. I have had my share of experience with infected computers. I still remember the time when I cleaned out my pc manually with all the duplicate files the virus had planted all over the pc.

Then there were free antivirus and I gleefully downloaded it to make use of it. There was only one that time too, and I think it was Avg if I am not mistaken.

-Avast

This is my preferred free antivirus software. The registration process is a little slow as you have to wait for them to send you the product key. But that said, it has quite a smooth operation and doesn't appear to slow down my pc much. Virus updates are also quite smooth which you can set to automatic. The only thing you might want to do is to turn off some of the audio alerts, especially the virus updated which can be really loud. Other functions are pretty standard.

Unfortunately I lost a bit of confidence in it recently when it did not pick up a virus which was residing in one of my network folders. How did I know about it? Avg picked it up when I was accessing my own network folder containing the virus and cleaned it out for me.

-Avg

So it appears avg might be stronger in picking up viruses or it could be it just scans more of the pc. This is the favored antivirus in my office. My boss bought a few licences and reused the product keys on other pcs.

For an antivirus, I believe it does its job fine. I just have the perception that its virus scans can be very slow and hog the system resources. This is something I do not like. Other than that, I do appreciate it cleaning up my pc though.

-Avira

I have 2 grievances against this antivirus. I don't care that this is the top downloaded free antivirus software. It bugs me with advertisements, which the others do not. What is up with that?

The other one is when it had problems downloading the virus update file. Although I have trained myself on it issues, I have not had to troubleshoot avast at all. I had to make sure that it had a clean reboot and no other programs were running before the update finally came through. That's the last of Avira for me.

My final vote goes to, AVG, but only because the rest cannot really match the standards I feel they should be at.

Source: http://goo.gl/xRgdY