Free anti-virus programs

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In this tutorial: How to select a free and effective anti-virus program for your Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or 8 computer

Last modified: 2012-04-25 14:21:06 EEST

There are uncountable antivirus programs available on software market. Most of them are commercial programs that require yearly subscription fee, but there are also several free anti-viruses available for home users. Free does not necessarily mean limited protection or annoying pop-ups about buying commercial equivalent.

By the way, to get a quick indication whether your computer is infected or not, use our Quick virus scan page with BitDefender QuickScan - the scanning takes just a few minutes! This will not remove viruses or other malware, however; it's just a lightning-fast scanner.

A free antivirus program should:

work at all times - provide resident protection, not just do manual scanning
update virus and malware definitions automatically
scan files both on your computer and files coming from your home network or the Internet
scan e-mails and attachments
scan instant messaging traffic (MSN/Live Messenger, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc)
provide basic protection from malware and rootkits
be compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8

Please remember that you should have only one real-time virus protection program installed at all times. Having more than one anti-virus working at the same time makes your computer very slow!

My first choice - avast! Free Antivirus

avast! Free Antivirus (previously known as avast! 4 Home Edition and avast! 5 & 6 Free Antivirus) meets all requirements above plus it scans P2P (file sharing programs - eMule, Soulseek, BitTorrent, etc) traffic and it is able to detect hidden web threats such as drive-by downloads.

avast! Free Antivirus 7, released in February 2012, adds new powerful features such as automatic sandboxing of unknown programs, cloud-based file reputation, web reputation add-on for Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, blocking of malicious scripts on web pages, etc. It also works with Windows 8 now.

It is a free, but yet powerful program for home users. It does require registration upon first installation and once every year afterwards, but that is not difficult. avast! Free Antivirus does not consume too much resources and it can do scheduled scanning and boot-time scanning. Please note that the old avast! 4 Home Edition is not able to perform scheduled scanning - upgrade to version 7!
I recommend avast! for computers that are no more than 5 years old and do not feel very slow already.

My second choice - Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials (aka MSE or MSSE) provides good overall protection for home users and for small businesses with less than 10 computers (make no mistake - its licensing terms prohibit using the software in larger commercial environments!). It is meant to be a replacement for Windows Defender by Microsoft. Version 4.0 (Microsoft skipped version 3 and released version 4 in April, 2012) of MSE does a very good job at detecting viruses and malware plus it is very easy to use and configure. There are only a few minor changes to user interface compared to version 2, but Microsoft claims that cleaning process is better and faster now.

Microsoft Security Essentials is not resource-hungry and it is able to scan your computer on scheduled basis, but it can't do a boot-time scan. You can still use the program in Safe Mode, though.
MSE is recommended for older and slower computers.