Free Anti-Virus Programs

No doubt those programs are good and an excellent choice. MG does list and promote those programs. However, when dealing with cleaning a system after the fact in a setting such as a forum. Using as many free tools as possible is generally a good choice.

That said, I have no real idea what you are talking about regarding getting what you pay for. What we recommend here works and works well. Sure there are hairs to split with everything, but we list nothing here that I wouldn’t use on my own system. Proof of that is on this system I am typing on AVG is loaded and has never had a virus.

Also, if you are talking about Joe average surfing or Joe Knuckle head trying to steal music - your have an entirely different set of security issues to deal with. Kinda makes me laugh actually. Lets get this straight…. Dude doesn’t want to drop the 99 cents for a song. He hits up a pirate site and gets infected with a virus. He then has to pay a wal-mart tech $100 bucks to fix it….then blames AVG…. A free program.

C’mon – That’s funny.

 

And just to add a little to what CP said, we do not just tell people to use an antivirus program. Our recommendations are multi-layered and have long been documented here: How to Protect yourself from malware!

And also we have thousands of people coming here for help each year, and just as many people who have pay tools like Symantec, McAfee, F-Secure, TrendMicro,....etc have infections. In fact, we probably see more infected systems using commercial tools. And in fact quite a few of these pay tools miss more of the current real malware problems than the free tools do. The data is in the thousands of threads in this forum and dozens more forums like it.

 

Hi

I can quote the same for paid for retail applications, what many dont understand when they try and say that retail is best over free is that for the main players like Awil, AVG Technologies etc is that the free version is in the main and by main I mean the actual engine software and virus definitions are the same as the retail versions of the same applications. While some developers dont have free versions Symantec and McAfee to name two fo the big developers, it doesnt mean that their applications because they are paid for are any better than that of free versions liek the ones I have mentioned earlier.

That is very true, many dont surf or download safe, they think because they use Firefox and not Internet Exploerer that they are safe from malware, they use p2p which is a harbour for malware, used cracked Windows Operating Systems and dont update their applications enough.

Dont agree with the above at all, they have no better or worse track record than retail applications, please site your refrences to the above quote on free being worse than retail?

 

Let's not forget about how many "AV Suites" slow systems down to a crawl. And I can't count how many threads I have done with commercially paid for security. Seems to me to be about equal in comparison to freeware. But I would expect that most any company doing malware removal for customers may well try to hawk their wares.

 

As being pointed out here multiple times, the free tools work very well and in some cases even out perform the pay tools including NOD32. Want data? See this website:

http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/main-tests

and download this: http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report25.pdf

While NOD32 still gets and Advanced+ rating, so did Avira and Avast. But NOD32 misses more than Avira. NOD32 on the other hand has fewer false detections. And then on the third hand (which may explain why if has fewer false detections) NOD32 is in the lower 50 percentile for scanning rate.

You can see from this report that the free tools work just fine and even out perform commercial tools, albeit AVG has been slipping a little and this is also why I have it listed last in the How to protect yourself from malware link.

However as stated earlier, even without the above independent report, we have the facts in the thousands of threads in our forum and we can see what the pay tools are missing. They miss more than the free tools, and they fail at a higher rate than freeware to remove things they detect, and they have a terrible track record at keeping up with the real malware problems we see every day.

In fact the commercial tools seem to be getting embarrassed by the specialty tools we use to remove malware like ComboFix, Avenger, MGTools (just to name a few). So their response is to keep declaring these free tools to be malware and they delete them which is problematic since these free tools need to be run inorder to remove all the malware that the big security programs are either totally missing or just cannot remove even if detected.

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- rather than inform customers of the effectiveness of "total package" protection -- be they "paid for" or "freeware".