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I personally use MSE and have done for years. I hate Avast and the way it declares that everythign it does has saved the world from ending. OK slightly overdramatic but it's constantly patting it's self on the back. It blocks a URL for being malicious and says it just saved your computer from crashing despite the URL being perfeclty safe when you visit it with Web Shield disabled.

BitDefender free has a good detection rate but no options. It will delete anything it thinks is malicious with no warning and no option to just quarantine it.

AVG is just horrible.

I don't mind Avira as it has a good detection rate but the pops ups are annoying until you disable them.

I use MSE for RTP and do weekly scans with MBAM. I also have ClamAV on my portable drive along with AVZ which uses the Kaspersky engine apparently.

carbonize wrote:BitDefender free has a good detection rate but no options. It will delete anything it thinks is malicious with no warning and no option to just quarantine it.

Might want to try Qihoo 360. It uses Bitdefender's engine and has a warning and quarantine. Been testing the last day and it's not too bad.

Actually read review of 360 earlier and whilst it's good it's bit slow in stopping malware. The reviewer said it caught the but not before it had chance to atleast one file.

Qihoo 360 had a good result on AV-Test.

View the results of it, Microsoft Defender (MSE), and a bunch of other AVs tested by AV-Test:
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-us ... vdec-2013/

http://mobile.pcmag.com/?origref=#!/art ... urity-2013 this is the review read

I read that article before installing Qihoo. I would say that any other real-time AV is better than the default MSE.

Ah but have that rarist of commodities, common sense.

Sure, common sense is the best! Never hurts to have a second opinion as a back up though MSE's 76% real-time protection vs. something else in the > 90% is a big difference.

The only virus have had on my computer in the last 15 years had only been there so could submit it to the AV makers. I had to submit one today and was seriously impressed that Kaspersky got back to me within 3 minutes where as Bitdefender says it will up to 3 days to check file. Still waiting on MS and Avira to check it.

Kind of related, Bitdefender has notorious bad customer support. Look at their forums and see how many unanswered questions there are.

I've always wanted to use Kaspersky. Someday, I'll pick it up when there's a good deal

Yeah I have some deals on older Kaspersky but buggered if I'm going to pay £40 a year for something can get reasonable facsimile of for free.

If you want a laugh have a at the 'global installations'count at bottom of https://www.avira.com/ they wish they had that many installs.

carbonize wrote:http://mobile.pcmag.com/?origref=#!/art ... urity-2013 this is the review read

Non-mobile link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422024,00.asp

So, I was looking for an AV for my other machine -- a nettop running Windows 7.

This time I focused on an AV that is as light as possible. Currently testing out a 6-month trial of Webroot SecureAnywhere. Very, very light. Roughly 4.5MB RAM.

The weird thing about Webroot is you cannot exclude folders from scanning. There's a rather large thread on their forums asking why they never added this feature in and it's quite amusing. I'll keep this on the nettop for now, but might throw Qihoo 360 on it later on.

Just another update, am currently doing some firewall testing with some of the free options out there.

I've switched from PrivateFirewall 7 after a few days to Emsisoft Online Armor Firewall.

I like Online Armor better so far. The GUI is way better and it has a neat current firewall status view:


The memory usage is only slightly higher than PrivateFirewall (around 4-5 MB extra for a total of 24-25 MB). I can live with that.

The others I might test include TinyWall and Windows 8 Firewall Control (this one appears to be portable). Or I might just fallback to using the default one