optikl said:
If you are determined to stick with free stuff, stick with Avast. A couple
of questions, though: Was your XP Pro system free?
No? Is the data on it worth anything at all to you? Yes? What about your
time? Shitty AV products and malware can cause corruption to your data
as well as cause you to waste time cleaning up their mess. Think about it.
Despite the comments above, I've found absolutely nothing 'shitty' about
Avast Home Edition. Any suggestion that Avast is malware is ridiculous.
They have written a full featured Pro edition that can compete with anything
else on the market, and they're free Home Edition uses the same engine as
the Pro. They've just removed some of the more exotic features of the Pro
version.
I used AVG for quite a while but the programming effort did seem a bit
second-drawer. Since using Avast, I heartily approve of their product and
think it is excellently written and has worked perfectly and trapped all
viruses that have come through my e-mail. It also appears they have a
functional repair facility (which was sadly lacking or at minimum barely
functional in AVG.) All of their updates are incremental, so you only have
to download (which is fully automatic, even with dial-up) files in the 10s
of KB, not multi-MB.
I've also used Norton, PC-Cillin and Mcafee, and all three are bloatware
that all end up slowing down your system and being a big headache.
If you don't want to pay, Avast is the way, IMHO and I think it's better
than lots of expensive products. From their website: "Home edition is a
full-featured antivirus package designed for home usage. Our company offers
Home Edition free of charge, since in our opinion, it is possible to avoid
global virus spreading by efficient prevention. However, many user are not
able or do not want to pay for antivirus software. "
Gregg C.