In my experience, the anti-virus programs are six/half. Most people qualify for some kind of partner-subsidized subscription to one of the large commericals, for example I get McAfee for free through Scottrade. Make sure you also have a firewall of some kind. Last but not least you will need an anti-spyware/trojan program like Malwarebytes. After my last infection with the "Security Tool" trojan & rootkit, I paid $25 for the Malwarebytes lifetime premium sub with real-time protection and IP blocking, worth every damn penny. Haven't been infected since and I frequent all the usual suspects.
have been using spybot for 4 years and no problems, have to remove one every so often , spybot has always found it
For paid subscriptions, I use Norton and like it. I used to use Zonealarm for several years but their recent upgrade screwed up my WinXP machine and things went downhill. I like how Norton scans things when things are idle. As for free products, I have some computers running off Comodo. I think it is better than AVG and it has a stronger firewall. I compared the two and Comodo found more hidden threats better than AVG.
Microsoft Security Essentials is free and awesome. I run MSFT SE on all my 32-bit machines and Symantec Endpoint Protection on all of my XPx64 machines.
check what your charting/order entry program says about av/firewall sw as it may require adjustment or non-use av sw doesn't stop everything norton and mcafee are terrible last time i used them, continuously checking for updates and freezing the computer, and i don't like 'suites' safest, don't surf and trade from the same computer
I use avast free. Also run online scans. ms liveonecare regularly, others like trendmicro housecall and eset, once every few months. Worked for me so far. avast has caught several viruses trying to download and liveonecare removed one that it termed "severe". Liveonecare cleans up some other things, too. I like it.
I was using Avira free edition for the last couple of years and so did others. However over the last year, I have seen a couple of trojans on computers protected by Avira. Could be that Avira is updating the files too slow so that new trojans can slip through the defense. The bad thing is that Avira later detects the trojans but is not able to clean the infected Windows OS. I searched the web and found many complains about Norton and others while Kaspersky currently seems to be state of the art. So I started using Kaspersky and also I recommended it to others. No complaints so far.
A good thread with informative links. Had a discussion with a software professional who had switched over from anti-virus programs to programs like "Spybot" and "hijack.exe" to protect their computers; things have been really good with almost nil attacks. Can anyone elaborate on the above?