YONTY on 14/1/2009 at 20:13
Has anyone any experience of the free anti virus software offered on the net is it any good compared with the paying stuff ?
bikerdude on 14/1/2009 at 20:28
the only one ive played with that seems to do what it says on the tin is AVG free
Renzatic on 14/1/2009 at 23:42
I've had nothing but good times with Avast. I usually recommend it to most everyone.
ffox on 15/1/2009 at 14:02
Avast for me too.
nickie on 15/1/2009 at 15:36
I use AVG but also have Zone Alarm firewall, Spybot SD Resident, Spyware Guard and a Hosts file which all work together and, at least for the last 5 years since installing these, have kept my pc trouble free.
Aerothorn on 19/9/2009 at 16:47
I just got to college, and (to make a very, very long story short) I had to install Sophos to connect to the network. Is this program any good, or should I ditch it and go with AVAST?
Enchantermon on 19/9/2009 at 19:15
You HAD to install Sophos? Did you have to pay for it, too?
I've used Sophos before (the college owned it already, I just used it to clean the machines), but I never compared it with Avast, which is what I currently use, so I can't make any comparisons. I do recommend Avast, though. AVG has, in the past, been bogged down and slow (though I've been told they've streamlined it since 7.5), while Avast is quick and fast, and leaves only a small memory footprint.
Also, for malware, I recommend Malwarebytes. I've scanned systems with other programs and immediately afterward run Malwarebytes, and it picked up several things the others missed.
lost_soul on 27/9/2009 at 17:44
I used Clamwin for a wile, but it is not a real-time scanner.
By the way, there are programs that claim to be free anti-virus, but are really malware, so be careful what you download. An example of this is Virus Response Lab 2009. I let someone use one of my laptops and they got this crap on it.
Enchantermon on 27/9/2009 at 19:14
Seconding this. I spent the last five weeks working at a PreK-3rd grade school with a computer lab. Some of those computers had so many fake virus protection programs on them that they could hardly boot properly. It was a mess. One run with avast! and Malwarebytes cleaned them right up, though.
