I’ve been using this for several years now & functionally it’s never let me down. My ancient lappy has a 1.73 Ghz Pentium processor & 504 meg’s of ram & struggles at times. I run AVG, Malaware & CCleaner on a regular basis.

Anyone care to comment on how big a drain on resources AVG is compared to Avast or other AV apps.

TIA Dave.

I changed to mse a year or so ago on the advice of techy guys in my IT dept. No problems at all.

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

i use AVG, and i have never had a problem, always finds bugs etc.

I use it as well no probs, a couple of mates usse the Microsoft one as mentioned above.

I used it for years, then they updated it and it took a downturn so I switched to avast

All ok for my home machines.

I used it for awhile but found it intrusive at times. So switched to avast that sits quietly working hard in the background.

I used to use it all the time, but its gradually got prettier and bloatier over the years, so changed it for F Secure (through work)
I gather there was an update released for it a couple of weeks ago which put 64bit Win 7 machines into a loop which caused quite a few issues.

I moved from AVG to Avast as the computer always ran slower with AVG. No problems with Avast.

Sits back and waits for the next “what free anti-virus thread”.

ive dealt with various av in the office…

AVG was good until version 11, it now hogs the pc’s

prettier and bloatier over the years

sums it up in a nutshell

MS Essentials is ok but again hogs the pc’s when it updates.

as above the best ive found so far is AVAST, it has handy features like turning off the ‘animated’ taskbar icon etc.

+1 for ‘it got fatter, so i switched to avast’.
however at the moment firefox seems to grind to a halt from time to time, and the only thing i can pin this on is avast doing a scan, so maybe avast’s days are numbered…

See the “AV Comparatives” results I posted in this thread:
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/what-free-antivirus-software#post-2113440

I’ve said this before but,

MSE is the best free solution currently. AVG used to be the best, but it’s got progressively worse since about v7.5.

If you’re of the bent where you feel warm and fuzzy about paying for AV, I’d go with Kaspersky.

I ditched AVG for Avira, mainly coz I think when I was changing it had just topped a performance/detection review.

I’ve used Avira for about 5 years, never had any problems. Ran it on a really old PC (2001) until last week and seemed ok.

+1 Avira. Seems to do what it’s sposed to quietly and in the back ground

used it for years, great performance, updated to 2011, computer went sssssslllllloooooowwwww, changed to TME, quite happy so far 🙂

After forgetting to cancel a 3 month trial, I’m currently a subscriber to a computer magazine 🙄 😳

They did an av trial the other week and, because i care about you all, I’ve just had a cursory skim read it

I don’t know much about this stuff but their methods seem thorough.

Result:

Free stuff – AVG 2011 won. Found all (31) the real viruses’n’shit and only one false positive (ie it stopped a safe programme from loading). MSE missed 13% (4 of 31) of the real stuff. Apparently MSE was the best one last time they did this – maybe it all changes weekly for all I know.

Paid stuff – only one was better than AVG (found all the real stuff and allowed all the safe stuff). That was “trend micro titanium”. Kaspersky was their previous winner but one of the 31 viruses installed itself and then disabled kaspersky

They said that all the software tested stopped at least 80% of their viruses