Free Anti-Virus Software Alternative To Your Out Of Date Trial Version That Came With Your PC

So you bought a computer and got McAfee or Norton Anti-Virus included but don’t want to pay for it now that your trial is over? I hear yah! I wouldn’t pay for them either. The big names in virus scan these days do offer very good protection but at a cost. First of all they are not cheap, and secondly they are resourse hogs. What does that mean for you? You can’t eat Kentucky Fried Chicken tonight and your computer will be slow!

I should say up front that we are talking about anti-virus only here – if your computer came with a software firewall and such, then this won’t cover that. I recommend a router that has a firewall built in then you don’t have to have the software running on all your computers.

There are a few good anti-virus companies out there that offer free versions of their products. For most home users these are excellent choices. Up until most recently I have installed AVG Free on computers that I rebuild for my home customers. It is still good protection but I am shying away from it because it is starting to resemble some of it’s larger counterparts and wants more resources.

Because I am not installing AVG as much anymore I went looking for alternatives. The first one that I is called Avira due to a lot of recommendations online. I found that had a good interface but after some a few installations it seemed that the auto-update was flaky. Some more looking around and I saw that I was not the only one. It’s not that it NEVER updates, but there can be delays which is a risk in the virus protection world.

After those episodes I turned to another product made by Avast. Their free product seems very robust but not overly heavy on the resources. At the installation it does something that the others don’t which is to scan before the GUI is loaded. This means that it is able to detect viruses before most are loaded when the system is booting – a plus in my books.

I hope that this helps those of you who are stuck trying to choose a product for virus scan and I hope that this sparks a debate with the rest of you experts out there. The more opinions about this one means more choice and hopefully more people protected.

Geek on!

UPDATE – Microsoft has just released a free anti-virus program called Security Essentials. I would suggest you take a look at this as the integration with Windows should be very good.