Best free AV and Firewall?

[Zephyrus]

As the title suggests i'm wondering what the current best free Anti Virus and Firewalls that are around at the moment are. Currently i use AVG and Zonealarm(I know zonealarm isnt great but hey it's free ).
I notice that AVG uses about 37mb of memory also while Zonealarm uses around 19MB (from what i can make out in task manager, perhaps more but thats what i see). Are these high? Are there better programs out there that use less?

Cheers,
Zeph.

 

[aaazza]

Think Avast is meant to be a good free AV. Sygate free personal firewall is also what a lot of people use.

No idea on RAM usages, all I can tell you is the my F-Prot uses just under 2mb nearly all the time.

aaazza

 

[|Ric|]

zonealaram seems to be one of the user friendliest firewalls and does the job

AVG is not the best AV software (hence it is free) - NOD32 is what I am using atm and very happy with it, seems better at detection than AVG and like AVG it doesnt noticeable hog many resources (compared to something like Norton or Mccaffe)

 

[HighlandeR]

I uninstalled Mcafee internet secuirty 2006 today from a customers latpop, made the laptop 2-3x faster upon booting up/accessing winxp.

And it had 512meg and 2.4ghz celeron..... think thats bad Nortons twice as bad.

Thats why I dont rate norton/mcafee as a useable Virus protection package, your better off using Avast/AVG or better buy Nod32...

 

[whitecrook]

AVG is free and pretty resourcefreindly (i don't even notice it)
kerio freeware 2.15 (keriopf215.zip) their last freeware version seems to be the best and least obtrusive firewall I have ever used on Windows 2k.

 

[uknorthboy]

I use zonealarm and avast seem ok to me.

 

[beaNN]

AVG is actually pretty good seem as its free. But NOD32 is much better, hense you have to pay for it.

 

[Fillado]

This gives you a good idea of how each AV program performs

AntiVir seems to rank pretty high up

 

[Neolink]

avast + zone alarm/sygate are great combos if you want free stuff used on a lot of freinds and family's pc's for years and not had one complaint about virus

 

[Ratbag]

I've been banging on about AntiVir being the best freeware AV for a long time now. It has a good detection rate (as evidenced by the above link), and its very fast and unobtrusive. It also consumes about 10MB as opposed to AVASTS >30MB.

 

[Alien18]

Hi i've just downloaded and installed AntiVir but the Updater isn't working it just sits there saying "Attempt to produce a connection to http://dl1.avgate.net" the dl1 can sumtimes say dl2 or dl3, etc but its not working. Would anyone care to test this to see if its their servers - it's probably not but i cant find any other problems at my end.

While typing this the updater has finally given up and produced a report saying it cant connect to the internet but it has full access according to Zone Alarm.

Could sum1 please test their updater and see if its me or ALL of the servers (cant imagine that AntiVir's servers ahve all gone down together but *** like to illiminate this option)?

Many thanks for any help in advance.

 

[Duradrum]

Hi i've just downloaded and installed AntiVir but the Updater isn't working it just sits there saying "Attempt to produce a connection to http://dl1.avgate.net" the dl1 can sumtimes say dl2 or dl3, etc but its not working. Would anyone care to test this to see if its their servers - it's probably not but i cant find any other problems at my end.

While typing this the updater has finally given up and produced a report saying it cant connect to the internet but it has full access according to Zone Alarm.

Could sum1 please test their updater and see if its me or ALL of the servers (cant imagine that AntiVir's servers ahve all gone down together but *** like to illiminate this option)?

Many thanks for any help in advance.

Not working for me either. Same fault as above. Any ideas?

 

[Alien18]

Just got back from the pub and its worked now. Incredibley all the AntiVir servers must've been down (i'm assuming that there is more than one server as it tries to connect to dl1 through to 7 on mine).

 

[sugoi]

I need a free Firewall for Windows x64.... i believe Zone Alarm doesn't support Windows x64 last time i checked, im currently running the windows firewall only... anyone got any suggestions?

 

[axel]

Note that Sygate has been taken over by Symantech and the Firewall has been discontinued.

How does Zone Alarm compare with the built in XP Firewall?

Axel

 

[AJUK]

Avast AV and the Windows XP firewall, together with antispyware, Spybot or MSAS and you are good to go.