Best Free Antivirus?

HangTime

HangTime

HangTime

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What's the best free antivirus software around? I need something which is fairly lightweight for the gf's laptop, it only has 256meg RAM despite being only 14 months old :rolleyes: and I've had to take Norton off to stop it running so slowly.

It seems AVG now only offers a 30 day trial unless I'm missing something, so is there another good free alternative?

She doesn't have an internet connection at home so I don't really need firewall features or anything like that.
 
As already recommended, I would go for AVG as its less resource consuming and more light weight than Avast! Which has many extra modules which come with it, so seems to hog a lot more resources in my experience also..

;)
 
Avast's using about 10MB of RAM here, with modules disabled that I don't need/want (Outlook/Exchange, P2P and Web) :)

If she only uses webmail then make that 9.3MB ;)
 
Yep, I'd agree AVG is always a good bet. TBH I've never really used Avast much, but it seems to get reccomended on here a lot so thought I'd throw it into the mix. AntiVir I have used before, and it is extremely light on resources (possibly more so than AVG IIRC).
 
AVGs popular freebie has spyware scanning also but alas its pretty weak and similar to norton/mcafee in that it may say cannot delete virus and the window keeps popping up, unless u fancy doing some killbox/manual ctrl-alt-delete fancy biz it can get too much though.

Avast is far better with a boot scan and can remove the locked files with viruses/spyware on it with boot and better.

Its just a shame Avast takes a long time to scan and if u run a scan after u just done a clean (even after a restart) u can find another 20 spyware/viruses ;)

Nod32 does it better, Norton/MCafee Ive used it daily for over 2 years and while good they have some bad pros about it, im trying the corp editions of both atm..... So far norton corp AV is good but yeah can notice a drop in performance although not as bad as internet security 2006 from purpleworld, scannings similar if not better went to uninstall it and it raped my system had to format/restore after so no difference to norton then !

Will see Mcafee Virus scan Pro next....
 
Been on Avast now for a while. Don't know how long my head memory is borked but a few months at least.
I like it. Good interface not a high user in my opinion but having 2 gig kind of makes that irrelevent.
The fact that i have disabled everything apart from the minimun and update manually keeps it tidy. But i am bang on top of updating and am habitual where that concerned. Right click on icon select click job done. Takes about 5 secs no big deal.
The updates from Avast are very frequent aswell which gives me confidence.
I like Free and with Ad-Aware S&D and Windows Firewall i am happy to recommend Avast.
 
Avast might be a bit heavy on 256 but Antivir is very light and should run great. FProt is extemely light but not free, it's only about £20 though and has the advantage of covering up to 5 pcs.
 
HangTime said:
What's the best free antivirus software around? I need something which is fairly lightweight for the gf's laptop, it only has 256meg RAM despite being only 14 months old :rolleyes: and I've had to take Norton off to stop it running so slowly.

It seems AVG now only offers a 30 day trial unless I'm missing something, so is there another good free alternative?

She doesn't have an internet connection at home so I don't really need firewall features or anything like that.
Click to expand...

Agreed, AVG is very good. I personally use PC Cillin, but that expired for a while so had to use AVG for a bit... was very good.
 
G-MAN2004 said:
So which one do you think is better? AVG or Antivir?
Been using Norton AV for years now but decided on a new one.
Click to expand...

I've only heard AntiVir one or two times, I've heard AVG a lot more. So i'd say AVG. But i've never actually tried AntiVir so I don't know.
 
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