Which Anti-virus?

[bmx1lew]

i would say avoid, Mcaffee and Norton there the biggest anti virus names and mostly attacked and personelly think there utter trash they are resorce hungry to the max and will drasticly slow your system down, as for zone alarm it did win awards however there source is on the net also i've had allot of issues with zone alarm and again can be resorce hungry, i would highly recomend Avast 4 pro as through experience i have found that works best, i can supply you a key for it aswell.

 

if you want the best anti virus go for Kaspersky, should i run into problems with avast i will switch, over all Kaspersky has come out on top in test and on paper is the best anti virus out there, but as long as your fully update with your service packs, and running a fire wall you should be ok, either that or dip into the world of linux and get some geek kudos im now running ubuntu studio

[tichkent]

As above - definitely avoid Norton and Macafee - resource hogs and generally kill your system performance unless you tweak the settings a lot. I used ZoneAlarm for a while as well, quite a nice product but still took up quite a lot of CPU and memory.

 

I switched to AVG a couple of years ago - it is completely free (and actually I liked it so much I bought it - tis good to support good software!) and fairly light on resources. As someone else pointed out there is no real difference between the free and paid version except for better scheduling options in the paid version. Can definitely recommend starting with AVG Free, and maybe trying some of the other suggestions if you have any problems. I haven't had any virus infections that made it past AVG in the last two years, and I download quite a lot of random stuff from around the internet - all legal of course

 

http://free.grisoft.com/

[MaveriK]

Sophos for me, it takes up about 30mb of memory, can be completely automated and is just so easy to use.