Staying Safe In Manchester.....
ChatterBank1 min ago
No best answer has yet been selected by andrew kelfo. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.There is a very good Free Anti virus that has absolutley no spyware - Grisoft AVG
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php
The risks that you face by not having an up-to-date AV programme are that you will be liable to catch any virii that are released since your last update.
A friend of mine bought a PC from PC(expensive)World without a functioning AV programme, no firewall (the Windows one wasn`t even activated) and no anti spyware. Within 2hrs of going on line the PC picked up over 700 infections including virii, trojans, worms and browser hi-jackers. The latter were that deeply embedded that every attempt to get rid of them failed and the PC was practically unusable and needed a full re-install of the operating system.
A strong complaint to PC World resulted in the gift of McAfee`s full Security Suite worth �50 and this together with Microsofts Anti Spyware Beta has solved all his problems.
If you don`t want to pay for McAfee I would suggest you uninstall it and download Avast from http://www.avast.com ,Zone Alarm from http://www.zonealarm.com and Microsofts Anti Spyware Beta.
Disregard the uninformed advice that ALL free software contains spyware. These do not.