comparison of free virus scanners

[Bill]

I'm thinking of changing virus scanners since I'm about due for an update.
Lately I've been using McAfee on XP, and have used McAfee and Norton on
Win98. I've also used PcCillin on XP/98, and a few of older products on 95.

I'm interested in the free products, support for older machines running
win95, and avoiding the entire licencing issue for upgrades, multiple
machines, etc, but I do want scanning and cleaning, along with updated
signatures as needed. I've bought so many scanners I'd like a break

So I've checked here and done some searching and found the following:

avast
antivir
vcatch
favs

and I read about avg (not free after 03) and bitdefender (no shield),
comments about avast seem positive, but I haven't seen much on the others.

Now the question is how do these products compare? I expect I will try
them all out on a win98 machine and see how they do, but a few comments
from the readers of the group might save me a tonne of wasted time!

/bill

 

[Lars-Erik Østerud]

Bill skrev:

I'm thinking of changing virus scanners since I'm about due for an update.
Lately I've been using McAfee on XP, and have used McAfee and Norton on
Win98. I've also used PcCillin on XP/98, and a few of older products on 95.

You are aware of the fact that even though your McAfee auto update is
stopped you can always download virus signature updates (and engine
updates) from their FTP site and update manually. Works very well.

I'm interested in the free products, support for older machines running
win95, and avoiding the entire licencing issue for upgrades, multiple

I'm testing avast! right now and it seems OK, has done well in tests
as well, is free for non-commercial home use (including auto update),
and it takes up far less resources that McAfee that I used to use.
Also have a very good mail scanner (a local SMTP and POP server that
all mail can be routed through for in- and outgoing mail scanning).

 

[Bart Bailey]

In
Message-ID:<[email protected]>
posted on Sat, 20 Dec 2003 19:26:49 GMT, Bill wrote:

I'm interested in the free products, support for older machines running
win95, and avoiding the entire licencing issue for upgrades, multiple
machines, etc, but I do want scanning and cleaning, along with updated
signatures as needed. I've bought so many scanners I'd like a break

So I've checked here and done some searching and found the following:

avast
antivir
vcatch
favs

Without F-Prot, your list is woefully incomplete.
http://www.f-prot.com/products/home_use/dos/