I got tired of shelling out $40+ a year for antivirus protection long ago. Aside form the price, what really bugged me was the bloat! It became more and more difficult to find a simple antivirus or rootkit scanner, without system tuning, performance monitoring and benchmarking bloat that the big guys were packaging with their virus scanner.

The great thing is - with all the free antivirus programs available today, you don’t need to shell out any money and most are simply virus protection without the bloat.

Free Antivirus Recommendations

There are many free antivirus programs on the Internet today. I’ve been looking for the best for my home PC, and to that end I examined ClamWin, Avast!, AVG, Antivir. Here are my thoughts on each:

ClamWin.

PROS:
ClamWin has an simple user interface, and is available in a portable version that can run on a USB thumb drive.

CONS:

Doesn’t include an on-access, real-time scanner. This means it’s basically relegated to an “after the fact” scanner - only worthwhile if you suspect you have an infection. This is enough to disqualify it from the running for my purpose, though I do use it on my thumb drive. I might come in handy if I need to diagnose a friend’s PC problem someday, (which actually happens quite a bit to me!)

AVG.

I then moved on to AVG. I have used (and still use today on my laptop) AVG 7.5 for over a year now with no complaints. When I saw they had a new version (8.0), with a slick new interface and a scan engine revamped for speed I figured I’d upgrade to 8.0 and be loving life.

Not so much.

AVG 8.0 would not work when installed on my 2000 desktop. It installed, but would not scan. Neither would it save any settings. There was no error message, it just behaved as though I never issued a command. In short, it blew me off. So I blew it off, and when back to 7.5.

PROS:
The AVG 7.5 interface is simple, not slick but effective. It gets the job done, and uses minimal system resources to do it and that’s a plus in my book. AVG free offers email protection (inbound and outbound) as well as protection against worms, viruses, and Trojans.

CONS:
AVG makes a rootkit detector and anti-phishing software, but offers both of these as separate programs. This might not bother some users, but it does provide a feature gap between its paid for counterparts like Symantec and McAfee.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to AVG 7.5 free is the scheduler. The user can schedule a full computer scan and daily definition updates, but they cannot choose the exact time of each. Instead, the interface offers a time range to choose from. For example, the user can select to have the definition updates downloaded between 6 am - 8 am, and the program will select a random time within that range. This is an annoyance, but could be problematic for users who shutdown their PCs at night.

AntiVir

Since the latest AVG interface was problematic on my older computer, I started my search again for a better option. Next I tried Avira Antivir Free. At first, this was a serious contender offering robust coverage of various types of attack. Then I noticed a serious flaw - no email scanner! Couple that with an obnoxious ad window, and it was on to the next candidate.

PROS:
While AVG offers rootkit detection as a separate product, Antivir includes rootkit detection, as well as protection against worms, viruses, and Trojans. Antivir also includes protection against phishing.

CONS:
Avira Antivir Free does not have an email scanner. This is something that is included with the other packages reviewed here, and it seems like a pretty big gap since email is a major entry point for virus infection. One of the biggest downsides, IMO, is an in-your-face very LARGE ad window that crops up daily. With the other options out there in the free antivirus market, this is enough to make me take a pass on AntiVir

Avast! 4 Home Edition.

The last free antivirus program I tried was Avast! 4 Home Edition. Quite frankly, it’s the last one I tried because it was the best.

PROS:
Avast! includes Anti-spyware and Anti-rootkit built-in. Each is implemented in separate processes for scanning web, mail, P2P, IM, network and on access traffic. Each one of these processes can be stopped, started or disabled so if you don’t have P2P or IM software - you can disable it. This is quite handy on older PCs with less available resources. It also offers Automatic updates, Virus Chest and System integration. The UI is excellent (especially for a free app) and it supports 64-bit Windows and Internationalization.

CONS:
I honestly haven’t noticed any real problems with Avast!. If I had to choose something, I suppose I’d say that it is a bit more heavy on the RAM usage than some of the others, but given the completeness of the features, I don’t think it’s excessive. Besides, the modular scanner architecture allows you to shut down or disable unneeded services.

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