can I download a product on line to protect my pc from virus's etc. thats free so I don't need to spend £50 on McAfee?

[ssd]

someone told me to download AVAST to protect my pc, are the free products as good as McAfee at £50?

Also heard AVG is a good free one?

I got 12 months free something with the sky broadband, but can often find norton at half price?

we use the free version of AVG

the McAfee is so expensive, but I'm worried we don't have enough cover and wonder if the free ones are as good?

We like Avast. It's really good and we've never had a problem.

comodo is good

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Another one for AVG. Have never had any problems with it and spend loads of time on the net. [net] It was recommended to me by someone who works in IT too.

I have AVG, and though its 'good' it's deffo not great. I have a sleeping worm type thing called 'brontol' which it detects but can never remove. my sister bought kaspersky or sommat along the lines, and said that it detected and removed brontok within seconds. and brontok is very hard to get rid of..my norton didnt get rid of it last year...kaspersky or however its spelt(!) is a 'paid for' one, but if your a barclays online bank customer, it's offered for free iirc.

not brontol- meant to say brontok!

I have heard Avast is the best free one.

Do you ban with Barclays?? If so you can download Kaspersky Antivirus from them and use it free for a year. I have done this and it's been great so far. HTH

I'm with HSBC and I think they offer McAfee free for 1 year for up to 3 PCs, but I too have used AVG for years, so have not downloaded from HSBC site.

From time to time, just in case AVG has not picked up something, I visit the Trend Micro HouseCall site, where you can do a scan (browser downloads their s/w and is used to show progress as the s/w scans your hard drive).

HouseCall is free, though Trend have their own (paid-for) AV product(s) too.

DH is also in IT and would also say you get what you pay for, although AVG and Avast are a substantial improvment on nothing at all (IIRC you tend to loose out on flexibility when setting the thing up). His recommendation is Norton (which is written by Symantec). He would not recommend McAfee (and having used it at work, neither would I unless its improved dramatically in the last couple of years).

Problem is, however much you pay, or don't pay, when a new virus comes out, there are hours or days before any of the anti-virus firms have had chance to analyze the effects, and patterns within the software to have a 'fingerprint' with which to identify that virus.

So you pay nil, or 50 or whatever, and neither of them will detect the virus if you happen to get it in the first couple of days.

As for Norton, it is something I'd avoid these days, as they made their s/w so deeply embedded in the machine that not only would some not uninstall with the CD, but eventually they had to bring out extras on their website to help people wanting to uninstall their s/w. Went the way of products from other big software corporations and became an all-singing all-dancing, and is something I'd give a wide berth.

When it was Norton (software by Peter Norton) it just got on with the job, but I think Symantec that bought up the firm/brand has been like a kiss of death. Gets lots of usage no doubt because they put it on millions of new PCs as a free trial.