Everyone needs a good antivirus to protect their PC from virus, trojan, worm, and many other security threats. I've seen many good antivirus like BitDefender, Kaspersky, E-Set, Panda, etc. but all of them are not free. You have to pay monthly / yearly subscription and some of them are quite expensive.
The problem is that antivirus software is so essential for every computer even if it is not connected to the Internet. Once I tried not to use any antivirus at all, and what happens is that as soon as I Googling something, I got some viruses! And after 3 days, my computer won't reboot because there are viruses that run at windows startup and prevent my windows to start, moreover, every folder in my harddisk now has a additional unknown file which replicates itself whenever I put something (like flashdisk, floppy disk) into my computer. That's why you really need a good (considered it is frequently updated) antivirus, and my additional goal is that it must be free of charge!
I found several free antivirus available on the net, they are:
- Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic
- Avast! 4 Home Edition
- AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
- BitDefender 10 Free Edition
Speaking about virus detection, I found that Avira AntiVir performs the best, it can successfully detect around 99.60% of viruses from around one million samples. That means, it even surpassed most of the commercial antiviruses' detection performance! This result is then followed by AVG by 98.10% then Avast! with 97.60%. The last is BitDefender with 96.50%. On overall, all of the antiviruses here detects viruses very well.
And about false positives detection, Avira AntiVir again performs the best followed by AVG and with almost no false positives from 20,000 test cases. Other antivirus are performing well although some false positives are quite irritating and shocking.
Scan speed is also important especially for busy people who don't want their computer slows down too long just because it is scanning for virus in routine. I found out that Avira AntiVir again is the fastest, with only around 1 hour to finish 40GB harddisk full of files. This result is followed by AVG and Avast! with around 1,5 hour. Apparently, BitDefender is quite slow in doing this job.
A good antivirus must have a fast response by its developer whenever a new virus is surfaced on the net. Therefore I tested how fast they create a virus signature update for the program. Again, Avira AntiVir is the fastest with available updates every less than 2 hour, then followed by Avast! and BitDefender with 3 hour, and the last is AVG with around 4-6 hour.
Memory requirements also important because not every computer has memory as large as 512MB, therefore in order to keep the computer safe and not having too much space in memory (so that other programs can still run smoothly), it is better to have only small background antivirus files reside in the RAM. Once again the smallest memory usage is Avira AntiVir with only 10 MB resides in RAM. AVG followed the second by only takes around 14MB in your memory, however this result is very different when AVG is doing an on-demand scan, it almost take 60% of your memory and CPU usage. The comes Avast! with quite high memory requirements, around 40MB (maybe it's because of the fancy skin cache). The last is BitDefender Free with 50MB, however it uses rather constant resources in on-demand scan.
The conclusion is that Avira AntiVir performs the best on all tests. It simply the best, free, and fast antivirus I found in the market. I would recommend you all to try it. In my own experience, I've used it for around 2 years (assuming your firewall is properly configured too - I used windows firewall though) and since that, I haven't had any virus problem. However, other antivirus are also good like Avast! has a very user friendly interface, BitDefender even has a skinnable interface. Avast! also has a decent adware/spyware removal.
Other free antivirus that you might want to try is Comodo AntiVirus 2.0 Beta. Although it is still in beta version, but I've heard some good reviews about it altough some says it has poor virus detection.
My recommendation is that you should combine antivirus with good firewall and spyware remover to make sure your PC is completely safe from any malware threats.
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