antivirus programs
Is there a good FREE antivirus program you'd recommend?
Forum Discussion
Jacksons, an AV company gives away copies to individual users as a form of advertising. In this marketplace the real money is in corporate sales and support, and giving away individual copies is the best way to get introduced to the target corporate market--at no additional cost to the AV company, since the software is already written. This business model has been in place for decades in the software industry.
McAffee invented AV software and Peter Norton took it to a new level. But when "free" AV competed with those companies for DoD contracts, both Norton and NcAffee were excluded in the first round of tests--their paid products were so useless compared to the "free" ones.
Norton has vastly improved since then but still lags the free software. Without giving some of their product away free they simply can't bring in enough money to pay for AV development.
Many people here seem to forget that Windows includes its own AV Firewall which defaults to protect people who think they're going without anything. Unless you are actively looking for malware by clicking on enticing photos or videos or downloading pirated content, your risks of infection on an individual computer are very very low.
However the Windows firewall is very basic and does little to protect users against themselves, or against reckless OS policies. The higher-end AV packages named in this thread attempt to do just that, but still have to default to letting the user (or OS) pick icky things up in the street and lick them.
McAffee invented AV software and Peter Norton took it to a new level. But when "free" AV competed with those companies for DoD contracts, both Norton and NcAffee were excluded in the first round of tests--their paid products were so useless compared to the "free" ones.
Norton has vastly improved since then but still lags the free software. Without giving some of their product away free they simply can't bring in enough money to pay for AV development.
Many people here seem to forget that Windows includes its own AV Firewall which defaults to protect people who think they're going without anything. Unless you are actively looking for malware by clicking on enticing photos or videos or downloading pirated content, your risks of infection on an individual computer are very very low.
However the Windows firewall is very basic and does little to protect users against themselves, or against reckless OS policies. The higher-end AV packages named in this thread attempt to do just that, but still have to default to letting the user (or OS) pick icky things up in the street and lick them.
