I’m a long time user of AVG Free but recently its annoying me with the amount of pop ups it seems to have included with the latest update. Is there anything better out there?

The in built windows stuff. Free and very good.

Is that Windows defender? I’m on Windows 7 if that helps.

Yep though a Win 10 upgrade would be another good step
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/14210/security-essentials-download

STW converted me to Microsoft Security Essentials and you can get for W7.All the others Avg etc. were to bloated and laggy.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=5201

However, still use Commodo for the firewall. Just like to see exactly what program is trying to connect to the internet and get an instant headsup.

Registering an interest in this. I’ve been using Avast for years, but the latest version gives really annoying pop ups all the time, and you can’t turn them off in the free version.

Have one machine on W7 and one on W8, and no interest in moving to 10 before anyone says it…

I’m on W7, run Microsoft security essentials and malwarebytes both free. MSE has real time protection, you also run a scheduled scan in background once a week. Free version of malwarebytes has to be run manually but I only do it about once a month

Microsoft Security Essentials is a shining bastion of consumer-first technology in a world of profit driven anti-user software.

It regularly beats premium AV suites yet does nothing to intrude or disrupt your computing.

USE IT.

—

The only downside is that people confuse Windows Defender (ships with Windows) with MSE (Requires downloading). I’m not sure of the business decision behind that, but I bet it’s to do with anti-competition laws.

redthunder – Member
STW converted me to Microsoft Security Essentials and you can get for W7.All the others Avg etc. were to bloated and laggy.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=5201

However, still use Commodo for the firewall. Just like to see exactly what program is trying to connect to the internet and get an instant headsup.

plyphon – Member
Microsoft Security Essentials is a shining bastion of consumer-first technology in a world of profit driven anti-user software.

It regularly beats premium AV suites yet does nothing to intrude or disrupt your computing.

USE IT.
.

You can’t really make a blanket statement like that, it’s better than some worse than others.

For example, Avast free outperformed MSE in detection rates and matched it for speed.

https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/

The free version of BitDefender usually beats it on both measures, although they only tested the paid version in their latest test.

The real advantage of MSE I feel is that there are no nag screens and no user intervention required.

Windows 7, download MSE.
Windows 8 / 8.1 / 10, Windows Defender will kick in if you remove whatever other AV you’ve got installed.

You can’t really make a blanket statement like that, it’s better than some worse than others.

I kind of feel like thats exactly what I said and you’re picking holes for the sake of it there, chap.

If I said “It beats all premium suites” then that would be an incorrect statement.

But saying it “regularly beats premium AV suites” – which is does – is entirely accurate.

I kind of feel like thats exactly what I said and you’re picking holes for the sake of it there, chap.

If I said “It beats all premium suites” then that would be an incorrect statement.

But saying it “regularly beats premium AV suites” – which is does – is entirely accurate.
Are you related to Boris Johnson?

Does MSE have a gaming mode option to ensure you aren’t interrupted when you are about to unleash your best leeroy jenkins impersonation?

Never had MSE interrupt any of my gaming FifeAndy. I game possibly more than I should do

Check out Sophos free. 99% of people haven’t heard of Sophos but they are big and well respected in the corporate world. Much more so than the vendors most people have heard of !.

Use what’s built in. Don’t feed the AV companies and their bloatware, which (conspiracy hat on) potentially is feeding virus writers also 😉

But seriously. MSE / Defender has been the only solution that doesn’t cripple your computer or get in the way of work in the case of a business environment (as a developer, have had many situations where the AV software has broken builds, despite putting exclusions in).

Microsoft’s AV is also perfectly competent at what it does. It isn’t super pro-active in that it isn’t checking all your email or your browsing traffic. It just catches it when it attempts to execute. That’s a good thing because the pro-active options seriously slow your computer down, break software by putting hooks into them that introduce bugs, and are generally just irritating to the user and if the user blindly dismisses pop-ups asking for action then it’s useless.

Commercial products of course may have firewalls also… so does Windows, and it does the job fine without impacting on performance.

I personally find Eset Nod32 pretty good and not resource hungry like sophos can be, it’s not free though 😯

ESET have an online scanner which is ace for post-infection cleanups where you can’t actually install AV.

Check out Sophos free. 99% of people haven’t heard of Sophos

If I were to use something other than Defender / MSE, my go-to would be Sophos or Kaspersky. Kaspersky are doing Good Things that other AV manufacturers aren’t right now, and Sophos is a great company to deal with. In a past life I had cause to ring Sophos over issues with a corporate install (back before they had a free offering) they wanted licensing details for support, when I didn’t have them to hand they went “well, let’s not worry about that now, let’s fix your problem first.”

Just Ms defender here. For a long time now.

You don’t really get ‘viruses’ these days unless you open dodgy email attachments from unknown senders.

Unless you go to really dodgy websites, then a good secure browser with a good ad blocker is the best first line of defence, or at least a browser that will prompt you to block or disable any dodgy stuff.

I have some other security applications I run if I feel like it, but active monitoring is pointless, it just chews up system resource.

Comodo here and virus free for years