2010 Free Antivirus Buyers Guide Discussion

By Charles P. Jefferies

Introduction

Over the last several months Notebook Review looked at several free antivirus solutions -- today we compile our results in our 2010 free antivirus buyers guide and declare a winner. Read on to see which one is most worthy of your bandwidth.

Read the full content of this Article: 2010 Free Antivirus Buyers Guide

Related Articles:

• Avira Free Antivirus 9.0 Review
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 Review
• Holiday Software Buyers Guide 2009
• AVG 9.0 Anti-Virus Free Review
• Microsoft Security Essentials Review

 

Great! Thanks Chaz!

I am using Avast now...came from Avira. It is indeed a lot better.

 

A very good set of reviews....

MS does not have a time limit for updates ... do the free ones?

 

.....actually, Avira is one of the best performing AV scanners, you just need to get a good firewall like Comodo and you are getting a pretty good combination.

And it's up there in the zero-day (not yet seen malware sample) detection according to this: http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php/Stats/Virus60-DayStats

Also av-comparatives.org rates them pretty well, and that's a highly cited source.

 

Its too bad Antivir got such a bad rap. Its usually tops the detection rate lists over at VB100 and av-test.org. Though the latest round, Avast outperformed them and Antvir lost the VB100 rating by 1 miss. However it did score number 1 in detection rate from av-test.org with a 98.9% rate as of Aug 09.

 

I am not so sure I'd agree with the rankings reached in this test, more comprehensive tests show that Avira's detection rate is better than that of Avast and is one of the top of paid and free scanners if not the best. Also after the recent screw up by Avast I'd really find it hard to recommend them as a top choice.

The problem with Avira at the moment is the high number of false positives that it's reporting in comparison to others. The degree of how big a problem this is depends on the type of user. I wouldn't want users who are less tech savvy getting false alarms that would make them think they have a problem.

At the same time I wouldn't put Avira at the bottom of the list because of that, behind AVG that has an average (at best) detection rate.

And about the nag, there has been a work around since at least 2 versions ago. I'm pretty sure that Avira developers know about it, and if they wanted to block it they could have done it already.

For me I am sticking with Avira on my desktop. And on my laptop I've been trying out MS Security Essentials, so far I have no problems with it.

 

I know the Avira nag screen can be disabled, however we test antivirus using the default install options - that is how they are designed to be used and that is what the vast, vast majority of users will do.

We review antivirus products differently than other sites as you can see looking at the categories above. I weighted pro-activeness higher than the other categories but we take into account more than that.

 

Wow the results i must say are shocking to me. I've been a firm supporter of Avira for a while now and i was sad to see them score so poorly.

I might give the others a try (well not AVG, but the other two) and see if i like them.

 

Where was Panda?

IMO, this test also should have waited until Avast 5 comes out in 3 weeks.

 

I have used AVG, Avira and now Avast. And I must say, in performance hit Avast is the lightest, AVG the heaviest on my old Dell.

On speed of scan, Avast and AVG were the fastest and Avira the slowest by far.

On ease-of-use AVG and Avira are top, Avast took me a few minutes more than what I normally use to set a full scan.

All my tests were done on a single core AMD Sempron 2.0Ghz and a 120GB 5400RPM. BTW, AVG 8.5 I think was the name, it wasnt the 9...

 

Thanks for the nice review Chaz.

I primarily use Avast and MSE on my laptops and agree on all points, except one, namely the update frequency.

MSE doesn't automatically update itself frequently/dynamically enough. It might look for updates once a day, but it seems to only look for updates at a set time (which cannot be changed by the user). If your computer is not on at that time, it will not be updated for that entire day. And thus you can continue to not have been updated for quite a few days, if your computer is off at the set time the next day. I might be wrong... but if I don't manually update MSE I often find that it has not been updated for days.

Avast on the other hand seems to check for updates every single day upon startup. In addition Avast notifies you that it has been updated. MSE doesn't.

 

I was using Avira before I upgraded to Windows 7 not long ago because it always scored high on the detection tests (by other sites). I never had any trouble with. The popup-ads were never really that bad. Download time was rather long, but I never really noticed as it was all automatic. But back to my point, most of the sites reviewing Avira that had high detection ratings were probably not using the free version. That should be taken into account as the free version may detect viruses as well as the paid version. Whatever the case I switched to Microsoft when I installed W7. They all seem to be half-decent for free products though so it is hard to go too wrong with any of them.

 

It looks like I should try out Avast, even though I am a stubborn MSE user

 

Hmm...I don't usually ever critique the reviews on this site but my gosh. It's like Avira was deliberately set up to place last or something. As someone who has been using Avira Free for sometime now, there are a number of sections in that review that I feel are deceptive...some things just don't add up...I wouldn't go into detail but nevertheless IMO you rock Avira...Rock on!

 

Nice comparative review, Chaz. I'm a big fan of MSE since I switched to Win7 and I'll continue using it...

 

thats really a nice comparison chart!!

 

Avira usually comes up tops in detection rates. Download times can be long but that's usually only the first couple of times.

Interesting Avast wins, last time I tried it it installed about 8 background processes. I don't like that.

One plus of Avast is that it allows password protection. This can be a huge benefit.

At the moment I'm not using AV.

 

I have used and loved avast for quite a few years now and Im glad to see it finally get some time in the spot light! As always great review Chaz!

 

I just moved to Avast from Avira and it is faster now but the UI is somewhat hard for those who are not used to it.....

 

I am presently using Avira (again!!) after switching between Avast, AVG, MSE and Avira in the last couple of Months. For me, Avira seems to have very little impact on the overall speed of my Lappie. It's almost like running without any AV. Avast comes a close second.

Also, Avira have recently upgraded their servers which has helped tremendously when updating their AV definitions. No more waiting for ever for the update to finish.

On the other hand, I miss Avast's password protection. That's a really nice feature that stops a virus mucking with your AV settings.....even preventing disabling of it so that a virus canno't go to town on your comp.

AV....always such a personal choice

 

Yeah the password protection from Avast can be a biggie. It saved me once from getting infected.

 

That's right.
i used Avast for 2 years now and YES it is the best free AV available.
it even block malicious code before download.
Great review.

 

The nice guide you have contributed there; thank you xD

 

OP Great job. Thanks.

I had the feeling that Avast was good. Now I know it's great!!!

Happy Holidays!!!

 

Does Avira work on Win 7 64bit?

For some reason I'm having the most difficult time getting it to work on my Win 7 64bit laptop.
The update wouldn't update even after 30 minutes.
It works on XP desktop fine..so I'm not sure what is going on..

I've switched to Avast for my laptop and it works now..

 

Avira does work on Windows 7 64-bit; that is actually what was installed on my test laptop.

Maybe you are having the same update issues I had? It took hours for mine to update the first time.

 

Hours...that is not the performance I was expecting..

 

Just wanted to add that I downloaded Avira after reading many rave about it here (before I read this review, ufortunately). And less than 2 days after I switched to Avira, I ended up with a virus on my computer. That's never happened to me while using AVG or Microsoft SE. The only problem I had with Avast was that horrible false positive incident, after which I switched to AVG.

 

That site seems to contradict AV-Com. It lists G-Data as one of the worst while http://www.av-comparatives.org lists it as one of, if not the best. Now I'm not sure what to believe.

 

Good question, shadowserver made me wonder too until I check the methodology what, when, how, why etc
Regarding shadowserver results :
I found out that these antivirus tested are old linux server versions
The engines tested vs the current versions available from antivirus websites
Avira AntiVir Professional (Unix) 2.1.12-89 vs 3.1.3.4-1
NOD32 for Linux File Server 2.70.5 vs 4.0
G-DATA Antivirus 9.0 vs 10.0 and 11.0
what about false positive regarding these results?
Cumulative results from 2006?2009?

Here is what I've found on their website
http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php/Calendar/20100802

Monday, 2 August 2010
Of Opinions and Anti-Virus Testing

There has been a very active discussion recently on the effectiveness of AV testing and the different organizations that conduct that testing. We very much enjoy any active discussion and will not usually shy away from anything that is open and honest.

Of course having anyone speak for us, especially when they are not knowledgeable about us, our methodologies, or our processes, only can exacerbate any issues brought up. So, in the interest of trying to get this discussion a little more open, I thought I would address a few of the questions or concerns that were brought up.

Q: Shadowserver's testing is absolutely not a reliable antivirus comparison source.

* Yes and No. We do not display our statistics for the purposes of trying to make one vendor look better than the next. We gathering in malware and test it. Your usage of the results will vary if you understand everything involved with the process. We only use Linux based AV test suites. This limits some of the possible results that we could get. Our tests are more in-line with what a gateway product would be able to accomplish, not an end-point client installation. There are a lot of other considerations and those are on our AV pages here and here.

Q: Linux verses Windows based Testing

* Yes, we are only doing the Linux based testing. It is more of a resource constraint than anything else. If someone would like to donate a couple of blade servers so we would be able to run two hundred to three hundred virtual machines, we would be happy to add in Windows based AV testing as well.