I am just about to renew my antivirus software on my laptop and am completely and totally at a loss to know whether to just renew the one I have now - Norton, or change to something different or download a free one. I bought the Norton in the USA andpaid less in $ than I am expected to pay in £ to renew - i.e. pretty pricey. I have a free McAfee on a netbook which I shall have to renew at some point as the free one was through my bank and only lasted for the year. They are not doing it now. As far as I can tell they both work fine,i.e. I have no viruses, worms or any other nasty creatures infecting my computers but really what is to chose between them and whether the free ones like AVG are just as good as the ones you pay for. Not being that technical they just do their own thing in the background without any input from me. I use the internet a lot, but don't do much in the way of downloading, I use itv and bbc players occasionally. I obviously have to have something but just don't know that. Comments and help appreciated.
I found AVG to be just as good as Norton. I had trouble using it with Vista though so now use Avira which I also have found reliable. Under advice, being no expert, I also use Malwarebytes whis is free, you do have to remember to run the scans though.
There is more to AV than it's ability to detect viruses
There are questions like how quickly the companies detect the latest threats, the amount of resources they take on your machine, what if any support they offer etc. etc.
Having said that it doesn't sound as if your internet habits are what I'd term high risk so you'll probably not find a whole lot of diference between them.
I work for one of the big companies so I make it a rule never to recommend any on here because I'm obviously biassed
However whatever you choose make sure that you keep it up to date as old av software is not much good - theats come and go so quickly now.
Also make sure the software on your computer up to date with windows update as many nasties use faults in software to get their hooks in too
I have heard from other sources that AVG and Vista don't work too well together, since the laptop runs on Vista maybe I'll give that one a miss. Only have 4 days more on my current one though so have to get on with deciding
It uses a technique which analyses the file and tries to predict its behaviour. Just as with people, certain types of behaviour can be described as suspicious (although they may be innocent). Any file flagged as suspicious can be analysed further, or even run on completely isolated machine to see what it actually does.
I recommend you to download this Kingsoft Free Antivirus. I get it from download.com. Also you can download from the it official website. Media URL: http://www.kingsoftsecurity.com/kingsoft-antivirus.html Description: