Antivirus software provides an essential layer of protection from a multitude of Virus, Trojan, worm, spyware, adware, dialer, keylogger and rootkit infections.
Traditionally antivirus programs just detected viruses and spyware removers just detected spyware but nowadays the boundary between antivirus and spyware removers is unclear. Most current antiviruses have at least reasonably good detection rates of all forms of malware.
There are some excellent anti virus software for free download. But it’s difficult to choose the right one from ever growing number of Antivirus programs.
Best Free Antivirus Software for 2013
In this article I have present the 10 best free Antivirus software for Windows and simplifies your task of finding the best anti virus software. These tools will help you to protect your computer from various viruses, threats and malware infections.
Microsoft Security Essentials
Microsoft Security Essentials is a favorite of mine with great detection rates, particularly for rootkits. Even more impressive is the fact that Microsoft Security Essentials has very few false positives, is light on resources and is good at removal of existing malware.
Microsoft Security Essentials is a great choice for average users because of the minimal user interaction required. It automatically updates and removes threats. No registration is needed, apart from a quick validating of Windows, and there are no nag screens or advertisements.
avast! Free Antivirus
Avast! Free Antivirus is the best free antivirus software in light of recent developments. Avast has steadily been improving its detection rates over the past few years and now ranks with the some of the best. Avast has the most features of all the free antivirus with full real-time capabilities including web, e-mail, IM, P2P and network shields, boot-time scanning, and a behavioural blocker.
The new version 6 brings even more features including an internet site ratings plugin, script malware protection and a limited (non-configurable) sandboxing feature. Although the sandbox is a very useful semi-automated security feature, the default settings involves a pop up to ask whether a software should be sandboxed for not – for the typical average user this can be slightly confusing though it can set to sandbox the software automatically.
Avira Free Antivirus 2013
Avira AntiVir Personal Edition is another high quality free antivirus. AntiVir is a top notch antivirus scanner with outstanding detection rates of malware, higher than almost every other antivirus according to tests. AntiVir is still a good choice for a free antivirus scanner, particularly for high risk users.
However, there are some minor reservations. First, AntiVir does not include web or e-mail scanning capabilities; this is only available in the paid version. The lack of an e-mail scanner is not a disadvantage, it just means that AntiVir won’t warn you of infected emails before you open them. But should you open an infected email, AntiVir will still spring into action, so it doesn’t mean that you’re not protected from email-based infections.
Also, AntiVir contains a rather intrusive advertisement every time it updates. Although AntiVir had signature updating problems in the past, this issue seems to be fixed now.
Panda Cloud Antivirus
Panda Cloud Antivirus is Panda’s successful attempt to jump on the free antivirus bandwagon. Panda Cloud Antivirus uses ‘cloud’ technology to provide for a much quicker release of updates as all definitions are stored in the cloud and thus the moment Panda updates their blacklist all users of Panda Cloud Antivirus with an internet connection are protected from it.
Panda Cloud Antivirus has a behavioural blocker and web protection, which will certainly increase your security. However as you can simply use one of the other free AV’s with a separate behavioural blocker to achieve possibly even better protection, this is not necessarily an advantage.
BitDefender Antivirus Free Edition
Bitdefender made available a free version of its product previously but did not gave it much love let alone updates. A new version of the program, Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition, was released a day before Christmas with an English interface.
The new product is basically a basic version of Bitdefender’s commercial offerings. It uses the cloud to provide real-time protection of Windows systems using the same scanning engine and protection that is built-into the commercial products.
While that may make it sound like a great deal, being free and all, there are things you need to take into consideration before you install the program.In short, you get a free product that offers real-time protection – including web-based protection – that runs more or less on autopilot all the time. If there is one thing missing, it is control over the cleaning process. The program may delete files automatically which can be really bad in the case of false positives for instance.
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