Antivirus

[donutsweeper]

Forgot to ask this in my excitement about the new laptop, but does anyone have any advice about what's the best free antivirus out there? I used Avira on my old one but all the Doom and Gloom Buy Our Pro-Version popups got really annoying. I have an adblocker installed on my browsers and no coin, but a good antivirus is important too. The laptop came with McAfee installed but I remember hearing meh things about it so I'd like to switch to something that's recommended (and recommended by people who actually use it and not blog posts/articles of possibly being paid to say certain things nature).

What do you all use? Do you like it?

(Laptop is running Windows 10)

Comments

[mlravenwrites]

Depending on your browsing habits/adblock, I find Windows Defender to be enough for me on my PC (with an incredibly-stringent adblock-- uBlock Origin). At work, we install Symantec (or Sophpos) for our PC users, but we have bulk licenses so no concerns about $.

[donutsweeper]

I've heard good things about Windows Defender before come to think of it. Thanks, I'll check it out.

[filigranka]

I use AVG and I'm content with it - it doesn't slow the computer down much, it doesn't spam me pop-ups and all advertisements (you know, e-mail attachements etc.) are possible to be turn off in the settings. It was bought by Avast a year or so ago, though.

I also use Comodo Firewall (yay for diversification) - they have antivirus, too, and perhaps I'll switch to it, one day; I've it on my laptop and it runs fine - and it's great, but it's also very, very diligent. Which is fine by me, I want it to - so in my case basically every application connecting to the Web in any way has to be approved by hand by me, or firewall blocks it (and this is great for all applications working and sending my data in the background, without me noticing. no more!). I'm sure one can change it in preferences, though, and you can check "remember my decision" box, so the same applications don't bother you twice.

However, I use Windows 7 and have no idea how well those two run on 10.

[donutsweeper]

I vaguely remember hearing good things about AVG as well. Thanks, I'll look into it.

[methylviolet10b]

Another recommendation for Windows Defender here; it's part of Windows 10 and does a good job. For ad-blocking it depends on your browser. I know a lot of folks happy with AdBlock Plus on Firefox and Chrome; it's not fully available for Edge, if that's your preference.

Good luck!

[donutsweeper]

Thanks! It really does look like a good program, not sure why they also included McAfee as well, except for the chance to possible sell a pro version to people?

[methylviolet10b]

A lot of OEM boxes come that way because of licensing/marketing deals. It should be fairly straightforward to turn off the bundled McAfee and get Defender going again.

[donutsweeper]

Probably? A quick look confused me but I probably just need to actually try to figure it out when I've actually got some brains that are awake and working.