best free antivirus for netbooks?

Hi

yes Microsoft Security Essentials works well on Netbooks as its very light on resources, I have it on my Samsung Netbook.

What Windows version are you using?

 

MSE should work fine with that spec.

Avast is a great AV and the one I use on my desktops, however for netbooks it is good, however like many other AVs they add various different shields for email, network, IM, P2P etc and these do use up valuable resources in the limited netbooks, so if using Avast on a netbook or any others of the big AVs I would slim down the "shields" they are using to mainly System, Web, Network and Behaviour only, as dont need email scanning as the system scanner will do any attachements anyway.

You will see in many AV tests that MSE does score very well and was noted in the last current downloadble Av Comparitives as being very good in the areas of less FPs and Proactive On Demand scanning and for performance in relation to low resource useage.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/summary/summary2010.pdf

But as I will always say the best AV app is the one your happy with using and works in you not having any malware incidents, but the main bit of any anti-malware campaign is the user and where they download from and surf, as well as keeping all apps upto date.