Question by jewman: What is the best free antivirus software?
I would like to know which of the following is the best free antivirus software. Which has the best score for finding a destroying viruses? Which has the most to protect my computer? Or any other opinions.
AVG
Avast home edition
Avira personl
Best answer:
Answer by Go4broke
Well for starters, let’s cover the freeware versions of antivirus available and cover why they often fall short.
The freeware version of AVG (as opposed to the upgraded commercial version) covers the bare necessities of security, with a simple, straightforward graphical user interface (GUI) nearly anyone can use. However, it does have a relatively low detection rate of viruses (about 81%, but who’s keeping score?) and a rate of false positives that is higher than most, meaning it will detect a virus when there is none. The free copy also does not include adware or spyware removal and support for the product is limited. While it does have safe-mode support, a nice perk for a freeware AV, it has little rootkit detection, no registry scans, no firewall, and has recently acquired a larger resource-footprint with the addition of email scanners, a browser toolbar, and a link-scanner. With the spotty protection and gaining resource requirements, AVG is becoming less useful as the “lightweight” alternative to Symantec or others and overall does not do an effective job at properly protecting a system.
Avast! Home Edition is another free security suite which protects against viruses, spyware, and rootkits, as well as P2P and IM scanning. It includes a webshield which scans all HTTP traffic, and a light firewall which uses signature-based detection to scan for known worms and viruses. It also has 64-bit compatibility, making it a good choice for some of the newer systems on the market. While all these features give an adequate level of protection for the price, the resource-heavy features again tend to make Avast! a bit slow to begin virus scanning. Overall, this is one of the best free security applications.
While there are several popular freeware antivirus applications out there, they all tend to have the same flaws: weak or no firewall, high false positive rating (to scare users into buying the “better” edition, I suspect), little or no rootkit and trojan protection, no real-time scanning, no “self-defense” application (making the AV themselves vulnerable to attack), and general incompatibility. While these tend to be general problems, they typically stem from the goal of the application trying to be “light” and “simple”, while unfortunately tending to sacrifice security itself.
As far as the paid versions, they tend to fix all the problems mentioned above, but have the curse of popularity to deal with. Symantec and Mcafee being the two main examples, the popularity of these has become so great that often malware coders won’t release the code into “the wild” (the public) until it can pass as clean. This allows the virus itself to bypass the most popular forms of protection and potentially infect more computers for longer. In my own opinion, the best overall security suite is Kaspersky, which has a lighter footprint than competing products, has better overall security than free versions, and is priced reasonably for a yearly subscription.
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January 12, 2011 
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