Virus protection for free

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Recommendations? Somebody said Onecare, but I couldn't get that to work for some reason!

Avast!

I use Avira. AVG slows some systems to a crawl especially after version 9.

Here's a really good article that compares all the big-name free anti-virus programs. Many informative graphs and charts:

http://dottech.org/freeware-reviews/14151

A somewhat dated video (uploaded 2008):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhXZo3dHulc[/youtube]

I suggest you also use CCleaner to clean out your cache and delete temp files and cookies periodically. Also free. Get it here:

http://download.piriform.com/ccsetup232.exe

You can download security essentials from microsoft at no cost.
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essen ... ?mkt=en-us
That does both anti-virus and anti-malware protection. One care was stopped by microsoft they could not get someone to pay for what sould have been part of the software for no cost.

http://www.clamav.net/lang/en/

An e-condom for Windows AND Linux.

You should be very careful about updating Windows and its Microsoft Security Essentials. Some updates have been known to brick your OS.

I dislike the reporting home that software does. I can understand Microsoft's reasons for improving the accuracy of the detection process by doing this, but to me it is one step off spyware passing back details of various files and programs on your computer back to some massive Microsoft database.

I used AVG for many years then switched to Avast but that came up with some inconvenient false positives and also had some other irritations so I switched back to AVG. However, it is important to install this 'custom' and tell it not to install all the extra crapware on your system.

Linux.

OK, in all seriousness, I use Panda Cloud Antivirus on Windows and it seems to work reasonably well.