best free antivirus

An antivirus is almost a joke in the year 2014. Modern viruses are polymorphic and encrypted rendering signature scanning obsolete. They can only detect spyware and old malware.

The only things which stand a chance are things that use Heuristic scanning, such as Kaspersky. Still, the odds are rather low, and they produce a large amount of false positives. And whenever one of the larger labs like Norton or Kaspersky releases new definitions, they are disassembled, and all antiviruses have identical definitions within days, so it truly doesn't matter.

Pick a free one, the 'virus' writers are mostly winning right now. Use linux is a good strategy, and while it does have better sandboxing than windows ever had, it main benifit is having less users, as Android shows, linux is still very vulnerable to malware.

Of course it's usually bundled with things the user downloads, there's very little that can be done for someone who will run anything.

 

free avira uses Heuristic scanning
another cool thing is that a lot of virus writers update the code for avira, which is why its updated every day to protect a lot of their own kind. they go after the easy targets...

 

Free Avast, but I'm using a Macbook, so I don't need an antivirus.

 

tried microsoft next, i was using firefox and everything would freeze up constantly and on ie it would freeze up on occasion. switched to chrome and in the short time i used it no problems yet, if there is any later on i will try avast next.

 

Yeah, this seems the most important. I see it on other peoples computers all the time...

 

I think that is actually an Adobe Flash plug-in issue, not AV.
I was fine using MS's AV product for along time, then one Flash update about 6 months ago and they haven't been able to get it right yet.
Google it, it is a very well known issue.

It may also be tied to the AV, will begin testing over next few days.

 

Kaspersky free antivirus is pretty good.

 

MSE works fine for me.

 

I am using Avast antivirus free version, it is very and easy flexible to use. It doesn't slow down your PC while scanning and it runs a background scan therefore does not require running the antivirus scan in the foreground.

 

I was using MSE on Windows 8 but unfortunately it didnt pick up a Trojan virus that somehow found its way onto my system, unable to get rid of this virus i installed Avast and bingo, it blew it away, so i've disabled MSE and am using Avast.

 

Most of what people get infected with aren't really viruses at all, just malware Trojan horse programs or spyware.