Hi
My anti virus software which I got with my laptop has expired. It appears I may now have picked up a virus as ads have just started popping up.
Can anybody reccomend any decent antivirus sortware?
Not sure if this makes a difference but its a Windows laptop and running Windows 10.
Cheers in advance.
Hi.
There's 3 decent free antivirus softwares i know of.
AVG is one of them, i have used it years ago.
Then there is Avast.
Avast is starting to bloat, and has started "advising" all kinds of stuff to protect your pc, but of course that will cost money.
Last one that comes to mind is Avira, but i can't tell anything about that as i have no experience with that.
All of these have been tested as decent (or better), but if you want top performance then you'll have to pay for some non free program.
Of course there could be other free solutions, but these are the ones i know of.
Thanks for that.
I appreciate that they are not going to be high hat software.
If I were to pay, what would you reccomend?
If you were to pay I would AVOID both Norton and Mcafee as they are really the bloatware of AV.
My choice wold be as Mas suggests either AVG or AVAST. (smaller footprint)
Backed up by such as Malwarebytes to give additional coverage. (resides well with AVG or avast)
I used to use AVG but they got too heavy with adverts. Then switched to avast which worked ok. One warning is NEVER use any "performance" tools your antivirus ships with, especially not registry cleaners, those can make a real mess of your system. On windows I also used malwarebytes as a free scanner, no realtime protection but good for second opinion file and system scans. After a while with avast I had problems from microsoft themselves, unrelated to my antivirus, of them pushing the GWX.exe "upgrade to win 10" malware to me. I quit Windows, went to linux and haven't needed an antivirus since. Even on linux though keeping your browser up to date is very important, and further securing it with NoScript (firefox only but a really good security tool) to stop drive-by download exploits is extremely useful.
As for what is a GOOD free antivirus for windows today I don't know, which is best varies pretty rapidly and I've been away from windows a long time. Almost all of them bundle junkware (harmless but irritating) toolbars and browser extensions thesedays, but most of them don't install the tolbars if you go through the full options during install and untick the toolbars. Also untick "performance" and "speed enhancement" tools, don't allow a "registry cleaner" to be installed
Whatever your OS the virustotal website is also a useful resource, lets you upload and scan files. You have to download the file yourself first, but you then don't run it until you've checked it with virustotal to make sure it is clean.
Thanks for all of the advice.
I went with Avast in the end but installed it under the recommended settings unfortunately, so maybe I'll reinstall if it causes problems. Although the Windows updates seem to have an error now and won't install.
Not seen AVAST stall windows update ever.
Seen windows updates break windows updates though.
They have a few tools to fix that but a lot depends on the actual updater error number etc.
I think it must have been coincidence, as I just ended up leaving it a few days, tried again last night and it just installed.
So far, so good.
I use:
Windows Defender
CCleaner
Spyware blaster
Also use a VPN for downloading etc..
Never had an issue to speak of...