New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Best Free Virus Scanner
Hello Guys,
Thanks for clicking my topic.
I'm looking for a free and good virus scanner that I can recommend to my tech-retarded friends. I have close to none experience with virus scanners because I believe common sense is the best virus scanner.
But just in case: What is the best (free) virus scanner?
Thanks again.
Comments
With regards to Windows, I've heard a lot of good feedback about Microsoft Security Essentials. Anywhere else, clamav (or clamxav for mac) is king.
Microsoft security essentials will be my first rec. However personally I would choose zone alarm free antivirus + firewall. Its firewall is one of the best and it uses kaspersky engine for antivirus.
Free anti-malware Malwarebytes can be good addition to above recommended MSE.
I work in a computer repair shop and we always put MSE in the machines.
Microsoft Security Essentials - as its quite light weight compared to many of the paid offerings.
Microsoft Security Essentials also.
McAfee and Norton have gotten to bloated with crap.
MSE.
inb4 "common sense" and "linux"
I think this is the best option.
Thanks guys!
I agree that Microsoft's Security essentials is the best. I have also recently been testing Panda Cloud AV, which has a free edition, it is very light weight since the processing is actually done of Panda's servers instead of your local PC. This of course adds some privacy concerns ...
I use to be a big fan of AVG free edition and Avast! Free, but both of these have gotten more bloated as time has gone one.
I would recommend avast anti virus.
That is what they claim. They market the scanner as a "thin-client model" where scanning is performed on their servers and only basic detection is done at the client level.
It dosen't exist " the best" but with Avast you are not the least. I saw some test results.
I prefer Microsoft Security Essentials + Windows Defender (included w/ Win8 and available for Win7 for free). They're great at detecting and removing anything not zero-day. While some articles online say that MSE sucks because it didn't pass a certification test, where it wasn't strong was with zero-day viruses; on the other 2 categories it did very well. Zero-day's are just plain HARD to catch, requiring heuristic scanning methods, which bog down the system.
Avast is awesome.
Does MSE check if you have genuine XP?
Yes, however, XP is out of support now. I saw it still updates MSE.
Nah, XP still has until April. Then it's time for it to GO AWAY ALREADY!!!!!
MSE is the one good product from Microsoft
Another vote for MSE on Windows
Bitdefender gets my vote. Light on resources yet high detection rates.
I always use comodo, one of the best free all-in-one packages, i would never use MSE or anything else like avast/mcafee again.
Old is GOLD! I will stick with XP probably for next 5 years or so.
"Windows XP (38.73 percent) continues its steady decline, but its share of web usage is still remarkably high for a product that will reach its official end of life in just over a year." ZDNet
XP 64-Bit Edition? :P
No 32 bit, SP3, slipstreamed by eXPerience for super fast, low overhead Windows goodness. I still have a P2 350Mhz, Celeron 700MHz, Duron 1300Mhz, P4 1.6GHz/2.5GHz, Athlon ?1.2Ghz, Celeron 1.5Ghz, C2D 1.4Ghz, C2D 2GHz so need to keep going with XP.
or linux?
No, tried all the linux, even the so called lightweight ones and they all crawled with loads of disk swapping (or had problems with drivers if I chose the older versions). With TinyXP by eXPerience, eerything just works even the P2 which I was using for a voip pbx server, NAS, bit torrent, usenet, rdp. The P2 has the lowest power consumption, something like 15-20 Watts and it was doing all those tasks under XP!
Everything worked out the box with XP (besides loading the odd driver or two), linux is just a pain. XP is best on these slow machines.
I'm not using the P2 anymore, as I don't need it. But I've still got it and if I wanted a similar setup, XP would be my first choice.
How do you plan to deal with security issues once MS drop support with XP. Or do you think that there won't be new vulnerabilities discovered in future? Not to mention application lever vulnerabilities.
It won't be just XP support dropped but also most XP applications support as much as they aren't already. Do you use flash? Or any other third party application? Vendors don't invest their time and money to patch products for EOL operating systems. Every new vulnerability will be 0day for you all the time.
edit
Forget about my question. I see that you already use some home baked fork of windowsXP which wasn't updated since 2011 or so. Good luck with that!
Avast!
Avast is also good for people they generally speak with his computer, avast answers you