Windows 10: View Poll Results: Which free antivirus will you prefer?

I must say I had bad experience with security already. I used 10 to check what works and what not and downloaded bunch of programs not paying too much attention to security. Left Defender only and earned a lot of PUPs, hijackers and browser add-ons, and other stuff, unwanted of course. Mbam and Rogue killer took out 81 things and "Sweet search" had to chase around manually and only finally got rid of it by uninstalling and reinstalling FF.

 

Thanks for that insight. I have trialled ESET before and quite liked the interface and the granularity of firewall control it gives you. Might give it a try.*Smile

 

Hi there

Some of these programs like Adobe Photoshop regularly "Phone Home" to ensure the license is valid, or it's not using a blocked key that's been filched by a Torrent, etc etc. Sometimes some programs quite legitimately check the Internet for updates such as VMware - you can usually block these options though by uncheck the option "Check for updates at start up".

With subscription services there will be even more of this type of activity so blocking ALL internet accesses from applications might not be the best route to go. Like in all these things it's up to the USER to decide intelligently how to use the computer.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Voted "Anything else" (although I'd rather call it "Something else" since I wouldn't use just anything else) and the product in mind is Comodo Internet Security, only issue I found with it was that the firewall got trashed when updating to build 9860 of Windows 10 TP, was fixed by reinstalling it though.

 

Speaking of AVs, Avast 2015 was released Download Avast! Free Edition - MajorGeeks and NO, it will not install in W 10 !!!!

 

Yeah, I tried that also last night hoping that the new build is Avast friendly but it's still a big failure.

 

Doh!*Doh

I forgot to uninstall ESET before upgrading to Build 9860.
Group Policy was all wrong and file permissions as well. What a mess!

I ended up doing a PC Refresh which fixed the problems.

 

Installed Bitdefender which works in full.

 

After reading this I would never again be able to trust Avast: http://www.howtogeek.com/199829/avast-antivirus-was-spying-on-you-with-adware-until-this-week/

Thanks Colin for sharing this at the Seven Forums.

 

Yep, the fooked up big time there

 

I have seen that and even posted on 8forums, or Tenforums somewhere and got rattled too, a company and it's program that is supposed to shield you from stuff like that, doing same thing !!!!!
I choose free Bitdeffender for W 10 now but I'm not satisfied with user interface, not enough customizing can be done on it. As far as I have seen, they are not doing it since newest 2015 version but still..... and to boot they didn't even bother making it compatible with OS that over million people started using in just few days. As a many years' user I protested and asked for explanation but no answer yet. Sure way to ruin a company, customer NEGLECT. Their commercial SW is sure to suffer too.

 

I agree 100%. I have a license for Avast but don't have it installed, for that and several other reasons. I don't believe I will ever use it. Even though they have quit, most likely because everyone found out and it hurt them, it kind of makes you wonder what else are they doing that we don't know about. Plus, I think it says a lot about the company and it's business ethics.

 

So, now that Avast is out, what is the next good FREE AV?

 

Now, you're just trying to start a fight. *Wink That's about the same as asking which is a better graphics card Nvidia or AMD.

 

Personally I would say Comodo Internet Security, however I am biased in that question. Well I'd say the Firewall and Defense+ (HIPS / Sandbox) are good but I would also say the anti-virus (as in signature based) isn't on par with certain other products.

If you or anyone else decides to try it, during install you'll have a "Custom installation" near the bottom left corner, click this in order to disable additional products that are bundled that you may not want to install, like Comodo Dragon (Chromium based browser designed for better security), GeekBuddy (Support sorta, useless unless you pay for the product) and PrivDog (Due to ToS can't talk about what it does, has to do with ads, don't want to risk it by saying more than that - Also I don't know the privacy regards to it, may even track URLs like the Avast extension did, couldn't tell you.)
Also note that during install you will be asked if you want to set Comodo SecureDNS as your DNS, you will also be asked to set Yahoo as your homepage, I'd recommend disabling these, the DNS isn't the fastest and not very good at its job, the yahoo homepage is probably self explanatory. You will also be asked if you want to enable the Cloud as well as anonymous usage reporting or something like that, you should disable these if you are interested in privacy, while they are supposed to be anonymous as far as I can tell, how can they really guarantee that if the files in question contain personal information?

Comodo Internet Security may have a high learning curve and certain things that would seem to be easy to configure are unnecessarily hard and complex to configure, no examples on the top of my mind but from personal experience doing in-depth rules for HIPS and Firewall takes extra forethought and testing.

I fully admit that I am biased in this question, I've tried to be as objective as possible in my reply but I only have experience with CIS and hence can't say anything about any other products. There are problems with CIS, it isn't perfect or even close to being perfect in my personal opinion and I have an issue with how certain things are handled but it is still the best Security product that I have personally ever tried, that said I haven't tried many, pretty much just AVG, Norton 360, PC... uhh.. .. Was it PC Doctor? and then G Data - although my knowledge of them is very much outdated.