Free Antivirus Solutions

In the latest issue of PC World, they review the top free Antivirus solutions available including (but not limited to) Avira, AVG, Avast!, Comodo and others.

Not surprisingly, Avira comes out on top.

Here's the quick summary:    

Avira has the best heuristic protection, making it great to prevent unknown threats. Also, scan speed was a plus, while it got negative points for its interface for non-techies. The one thing that always bothered me about Avira was the advertisements for the pro version, but thankfully, there are ways to get around this. This seems like the best for technical folks.

Avast! has a great anti-malware mechanism, but the interface is still the same as it has been for years: clunky, clunky, and oh, did I mention? Clunky - it's not intuitive to a new (or sometimes longtime) user how to scan your computer. I have, however always liked how it allows you to run a boot-time scan in addition to a screen-saver mode. One bad mark from me is that you have to re-register every year. Not that this is an issue for me, but for 99% of my home-users that I support, they let it expire and never re-register. *shakes head*

AVG is the darling of the Internet. It has a pretty friendly interface, and it was fair at blocking new unknown threats. Overall speed wasn't the greatest and its malware detection wasn't up to snuff to Avira. With that said, it did do a good job of preventing false-positives. I can see this as a toss-up with the new (and not fully reviewed) Cloud Antivirus for being the friendliest for non-techies.

Microsoft Security Essentials Beta (which has since been released) is a newcomer to the AV market, replacing the OneCare line. This one actually scored pretty well, cleaning malware with ease, including new unknowns. The biggest ding against it was its scan speed. It is noted in the review that this is beta, so there is a possibility that this could change with the full version.

PCTools Antivirus rated poorly, ok, terribly with regards to spyware protection. In addition, it "left the door wide open for about half of the malware in our tests." It scored dead last in detecting new unknown threats. Also, it didn't schedule a scan by default, nor is it set for automatic updates without manually configuring after installation.

Comodo Internet Security has a special place since it also is a freely available commercial solution (unlike the others), and it includes a firewall product (which was not reviewed). The bad? The default installation changes your default browser search engine, installs a social toolbar, and switches your homepage to hopsurf.com. Yikes. It scored a 74.6% malware detection rate, and produced the most false-positives of any of the programs reviewed, which in my book is unacceptable. Finally, it has a prompt-to-accept action based methodology that prompts you to allow or deny certain actions from being taken. This reminds me (and apparently, the reviewer too) a lot of the old firewall programs of a few years back.

A couple mentions but weren't included in the final scoring was ClamWin ("not ready for primetime" - mostly for its lack of active scanning, and virus detection was mediocre), and the new kid on the block, Panda Cloud Antivirus, which from initial showings seems like a great contender.

Interesting stuff...over the years, I've always been a fan of Avast! but I have to say, I've been using Avira on my home computers as of late. It does do a great job, as long as you keep the advertisements to a minimum. I will be trying Microsoft Security Essentials soon, though - I like to keep track of what's out there!

Not that this reflects the free apps specifically, but the av-test.org quadrant map shows some good information with regards to AV effectiveness, which is indicative of the company's free offerings which (I would guess) use the same scanning engine.