[Paul Bennett]

My norton subscription is about to run out (came with my new PC) and I really dislike norton these days, so I wont renew. I need some Ideas of some decent, quality antivirus software, that is free (with new defination updates).

Does such software exist? What would you recommend?

Thanks so much.

EDIT: Please move to Software > Applications. Sorry.

Edited by Paul Bennett, 31 May 2006 - 10:09 PM.

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Avast is my favourite, does pretty much eveything norton does but better in every way, lighter on resources less intrusive and looks good as its skinable.
It updates usually several times a day which is excellent better than norton does and it has its own firewall.

Other alternatives are AVG or antivir but i dont like them as much because they arent as feature rich as Avast and dont have the same level of "polish".

[warriorscot]

Avast is my favourite, does pretty much eveything norton does but better in every way, lighter on resources less intrusive and looks good as its skinable.
It updates usually several times a day which is excellent better than norton does and it has its own firewall.

Other alternatives are AVG or antivir but i dont like them as much because they arent as feature rich as Avast and dont have the same level of "polish".

[humminn]

AVG is also an GOOD one.

You can also try WinAntiVirus Pro this works quite well also

[gerryf]

AVG and Avast are the two best freeware AV programs that offer realtime protection--meaning, that they are always sitting in the background looking for suspicious activity

you should choose on or the other, but not both--two AV programs that do realtime scanning will cause trouble at times.

It is not a terrible idea to complement one of these with a second AV program without realtime scanning. Once a month, disable the realtime AV program and run the other.

There are a number of these available. Antivir PE and Bitdefender Free are good options.

Another program to watch is ClamWin. This is based on the opensource Clam AV. They are getting very good with updates, sometimes as often as several times a day.

The best av program is the one that has the most recent definitions.

Clam AV has come on strong in the last year in this regard

At the moment, Clam does not have realtime monitoring, though the next major upgrade will incorporate it. It bears watching.