3 Best Free Antivirus

A local software vendor may have recommended an antivirus for you PC and you probably thought he is out to make sales. Well, not only can a virus cause great damage to you PC, but can also lead to identity theft and eventual comprose of you financial and back accounts. Therefore, everyone need the best antivirus software the market can offer. Fortunately, there are number of top antivirus that are free for home use, and which match up to the kind of good protection provide by ones available through sales.

But in case you wonder why these firms give away good products; well, perhaps because the pro vesrions has more features that require you to purchase. Nonetheless, the non-pro version still provide good protection for home computers.



One more thing to note is that the antiviruses are mainly for the Windows operating system with only Avast having a version for Mac computers.

1. Avast Home Edition Free Antivirus
I have to crown Avast as the overall best free antivirus for, among other reasons, having excellent virus and spyware detection rates according to antivirus test results from AV-Test.org.

Avast antivirus manages to provide a simple and functional user interface, while also being very customizable and feature complete. The active protection feature monitors seven different ways that a virus could enter your computer, including Web browsing, email, file sharing, and more.

Avast also features scanning on boot up if you choose to do so. That's something you don't want to do on every boot as it takes quite a while. However, if you suspect you have been exposed to a virus or spyware it is the best way to detect and remove active infections.

2. Avira Personal Free Antivirus
Avira is another one of the best free antivirus products, but it is not as full featured as Avast. The free version of Avira doesn't claim to protect against spyware, but I believe there is some crossover between what is defined as a virus and as spyware. If you want to make sure you are covered for spyware you can use something like SuperAntiSpyware which also has a free version.

Avira has an attractive interface, but it needed more tweaking to get things to function the way I wanted than did Avast. According to AV-Test.org Avira rates slightly higher than Avast for virus detection. However, if the spyware tests were run on the free version of Avira the score would be very low since they reserve the antispyware feature for the paid version.
Publisher's Site

3. AVG Antivirus Free Edition
AVG is the most popular and one of the best free antivirus software products. AVG has a very polished user interface and is easy and comfortable to use. AVG detects both viruses and spyware in the free edition. However, in the test mentioned above the detection rate is a little lower than Avast or Avira.

The main thing that puts AVG last in my choices for best free antivirus is the amount of functionality left out of the free version verses the the paid version of the software. You still get good basic protection, but Avast and Avari cover more of the infection pathways than does AVG.

All three of these best free antivirus choices can be easily installed and uninstalled. You can feel free to try all of them to choose your favorite.