What is Your Favorite Anti-Virus Software for Windows at Home?

I used to have trendmicro I used it for free when I worked with a previous company, when I left I had to uninstall it and switched to using Zone Alarm.

I tell you on some days I really want to pull my hair out when my PC really works like a snail and sometimes really so unresponsive for up to 5minutes or more, I'm tired of using ZA and ready for another change even if I have to pay for it.

I have a Celeron 2.4GHZ with 768MB ram, not the newest but with trendmicro it was still very responsive. Before trend I used symantec that in my opnion is another big resource guzzling software too.

So what else is good Anti-virus with built-in Firewall that won't gobble up all my system resources.

For antivirus on Windows XP, I use Avast Free and for a firewall I use Comodo Pro.

hey thanks dangral but what's the performance like, is your PC responsive after using these 2 software? What are your machine specs?

Hey sparcguy, I use Avast Free as well. And I have a reasonably old laptop - 1.6GHz Pentium M (no "Core"), 512MB RAM, Windows XP Home Edition.

While it does work well most of the time, I find that it also does slow things down a bit.

seems like a number of folks use avast. zonealarm is free too, well sort of.

but avast sounds a lot like zonealarm i don't wanna get something that works like zone. I don't mind to pay but it must be worth the money.

thanx for the info bt.

I installed Avast on my XP laptop thanks to this thread and like it.

Zonealarm, I never really liked it (locked up, very slow etc.)

If folks list all the AV software they like (or think should be on our list), we can create a poll on this topic for everyone to vote on.

I use McAfee and it sometimes slows stuff down. But it periodically rescans every file on my system to catch newly discovered malware. Are these products that cause no performance issues simply not rescanning?

A little slow during scanning is ok and maybe unavoidable but it shouldn't hang. Also during self updates ZA totally hangs.

But ok let's start to build this list.

Antivirus software

1. ZoneAlarm-AV-FW-pay-poor
2. Avast-AV-NA-free-so so
3. TrendMicro-AV-FW-pay-good
4. Symantec-AV-FW-pay-bad
5. Comodo Pro-NA-FW-free-unknown
6. AVG-AV-NA-Free-good
7. NOD32-AV-FW-pay-v.good
8. Sandboxie----pay-???

ok what else is there out there. I'm pretty there's a lot more out there

we need performance status on comodo Pro firewall.

AV

• AVG (free edition) - light on resources - good
• NOD32 (pay) - light on resources - very good
  ____
  There's also a nice, lightweight, and very efficient anti-malware appl, called Sandboxie, used to be free but not now, which creates an isolation "wall" between a certain application, example your browser and PC's hard drive. Whatever is downloaded from the net, spyware, viruses,... remains in this sandbox, and can be deleted when you close your browser.
  It can also be used to isolate other programs as well, which you wish to have them contained, say you want to test a new software. It creates a sort of virtual environment. It's sad that is only for windows.

Sandboxie - (pay) - very light on resources - very good.
____

i am not infected by winblows and hence don't have to bother about all those listed above

hey shouldn't this thread go in Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions - The UNIX Forums

I don't know, maybe. Then again, that seems to be more of a discussion of Windoze, not its programs.

Back on topic, I use Avast (free).

AVG has a free option with additional paid for upgrades.
not sure how good/effective it is, i installed it for a pal as a guinea pig . here is link to download... AVG Free - Download AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition for Windows XP and Vista

I added a poll.

If your option is missing, please let us know and we will add it to the poll (let us know if you use the free or paid version, thanks).

I use McAfee. Even though the software is sometimes free, they charge for a subscription to get updates to the virus database.

thx for adding the poll

Hi Perderabo,

You can vote for McAfee now .... if you like.

I use Avast Free and sometimes I run a scan with Spybot - Search & Destroy, a free spyware detector.

It's incredible how many threats can be found on a Windows machine!

Avira is a free powerful tool.

You can now vote for Avira if you choose.

I use Norton 360 v2. In the DOS era I sort of admired the Norton brand but as someone pointed out that is gradually eroding with the Symantec brand. My experience is that N360v2 is not quite resource intensive and I did not notice significant slowdown, but I'm not too much impressed either.

But it did corrupt the jscript.dll on my Vista and causes IE7 and Vista sidebar widgets to malfunction. I needed to do a system file checking manually to fix but that was not a great deal so long that can be fixed.