Avast! is one that I know of. Haven't used it, myself.

EZ-antivirus is free for trial (1 year):
http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/

A reinstall of EZ restarts the trial counter.. :-)
Been using it for 2 years.

I have been using AVG Free for the last 3 1/2 years and it works great. You can get it at http://grisoft.com

I use ClamWin, mainly because it's the only libre Windows XP antivirus app that I've found. I haven't yet had any virus problems.

I've been using AntiVir Personal Edition for two years with complete satisfaction. It is small and light on system resources. The updates are frequent and comprehensive. It does not scan email; however, AntiVir Guard is always running in the background, and it will not let you save an infected file. It has never let me down, nor has it ever issued a false positive. Highly recommended.

http://www.free-av.com

AVG free is very good. (grisoft.com)

Avast! 4.5 Home Edition (http://www.avast.com/eng/down_home.html) is free for personal use. You have to register every 15 months to stay current. Very timely incremental pattern updates, excellent technical support via their online forum (http://forum.avast.com/). I cannot praise this software highly enough.

I've always used AVG. It's quite nice to use.

AVG has better detection rates than Avast apparently. Avast has a totally awful interface and stupid sound alerts so I'd stay clear of Avast. AVG seems to take quite a while to load so I get stuck on the "Welcome" screen for some 15 seconds.

for those who have used avg and antivir, which one would you say comes out on top comparing the load on system resources and the accuracy of finding new and exisiting viruses?

I Use ANTIVIR personal edition
- it is light, works fine
- updates are frequent, and there is a periodical message 'caution thin ice' to ask you for update
http://www.free-av.com/
only problem, not very frequent, sometimes the server is busy and it is long to download the update

I have tried also AVAST but it was not pleasant (heavy, a lot of messages, update not very clear)

You may have a look at Chronomium: http://antesis.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=41&lang=en

It's an ISO image based on Knoppix which will boot, detect your partitionsm and try a bunch of AV on it, entirely automated.

AVG seems unprofessional compared to Avast! Antivirus. Give it a try at http://www.avast.com/i_kat_207.php?lang=ENG

Note though, if you let it scan incoming mail and you're using Thunderbird and it detects a virus, it will want to remove the whole mailbox file, effectively wiping your whole inbox. Do not allow it to do that!

Im another happy user of Avast!
It works really good for me, and it scans email :)

I tried Avast! once, but I never got infected during that time, so I couldn't judge its capabilities to remove viri. From what I understood though, it uses some kind of database with file signatures (called the Virus Recovery Database or something along those lines), and it can only repair files if they have been added to said database.

From this I gathered that if a file was not in the VRDB at the time of infection, the file cannot be repaired, only removed.

I don't want to spread FUD, as I don't _know_ if this is true or not, so I hope someone will correct me! :-D
Other than that, Avast! seemed fairly nice, although it rendered an old computer (P2-350) pretty unusable. But then, just putting Windows XP on such an old machine equipped with only 64 megs of memory was pretty much killing it in the first place.

I've been using AntiVir Personal for about 1.5 years and I'm very happy with it. Almost every time you perform the "Internet update" they've got new signatures ready, so they update very frequently.

The UI feels somewhat outmoded, but hey, not everyone's got as good UI designers as the MoFo has ;) I've installed it for a lot of friends (non-geeks) and never had problems with it.

As written by others, it's very light on resources and unobtrusive. Give it a try.

http://www.free-av.com/

AVG Free Edition
http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/
is very nice!

Haven't compared free AV's, but AVG Free edition works fine for me.

I used AVG and Avast, and I prefer Avast. Avast for example on 2000/XP can scan files downloaded using many IM and p2p applications. (Including Miranda). It's interface might be a little too Winamp-like, but you can download another skin for it. Moreover, which any other antivirus signals virus detection with sound of siren and prompt which says: "Don't panic!"...

I've used Avast! and AVG - and once I managed to turn all of the skins off, Avast! was the better software - http://www.avast.com/ (it even picks up virus-infected mail on its way into Thunderbird)

HTH, Olly.

AVG .. definetly.

Amazing product.. and free!

Norton... it's not free, but it never let me down.

I had 2002... so the upgrade cost me something like $20 for 2 computers... not a bad deal.

AVG Free has worked like a charm for me and they just recently came out with a new version -- if anyone should appreciate the continuing efforts of software developers of a free product, it should be you Asa. ;)

The AVG antivirus worked very well until they released that latest version and disabled the old one, forcing the new version on to me. Why? Actually not because of that annoying business practice, but because it suddenly made my boot up time increase by, say, 40 seconds. No idea why but beyond annoying. I think I'll go check out Avast! instead. :-/

I been using AVG on my machine for more than an year and it works awesome. I don't like a bunch of crappy stuff loaded when i boot and thereby taking up all my RAM. AVG is light and fast. And i using a 65mb pentium II machine.

AVG Free Edition is the best free one I've found. I only switched from Norton Pro a few months ago, but I've been impressed.

Asa,

Try ClamWin (www.clamwin.com), a Windows front-end to the excellent free ClamAV. I use ClamAV on our (Linux) server for almosty a year with no problems. I started to use CLamAV on my Windows desktop in November. I already see I will not renew my e-Trust EZ subscription in April.

The only downside is that ClamAV (at least so far) has no real-time virus scanner. However, this in no problem for me as I never use any AV software in this way - I prefer to check manually every file I download or save from an email message.

Thanks for your Mozilla work,

Jacek

www.free-av.com
Installed on all my machines, all my family machines, my friends' machines, and even on the company next door's machine because of me.

BitDefender!
http://www.bitdefender.com/bd/site/downloads.php?menu_id=21
All the free antivirals (it feels you had no idea there are such things) have a downside: either you can't get updates (I remember Panda doing that), or you can't keep it resident in memory (a.k.a. real time protection). Free editions of BitDefender doesn't protect you in real-time, and you will have to scan each downloaded file.
The most beautiful job is done by its ful version. I used a trial and I was very glad to see it catching malevolent HTML pages browsed in Mozilla (although they were dangerous only for Java or for Internet Explorer) and viruses arriving through Mozilla mail app.

Avast is what you want. AVG doesn't detect as much and the Avast people are VERY good about updating. Disable sounds if you don't want to hear that your database has been updated. Its what I install for every home user I have to do service calls on and I've yet to have a complaint. Its truly more professional and a better product than AVG and especially Norton. I can't tell you how many machines where I've seen the home version of Norton sitting there happyily not saying anything while the person's machine was invested with trojans and viruses. Finally performance wise eventhough You'll see it taking up a bit of ram in task manager I've seen zero slowdown using it on a PIII700 256MB laptop. I don't hate AVG btw, I used to use it. Avast is just a better product at this point.

btw Luci what your saying about the free products is not true. Avast updates almost daily and has better real-time protection than most commerical products.

I would recommend either AVG 7 from http://free.grisoft.com or the free EZ Armor from http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/

AVG 7 seems to be a nice improvement over AVG 6. The free EZ Armor has kept my mom's PC clean for a while now. It kept getting infected about once a week when she had Avast on it. I guess it depends who you ask, you will find people with good and bad things to say about everything out there.

AVG. no question.

A few months late for me... I had the same question, which I asked a forum a frequent. I found AVG to be just what I needed. It does what I want it to do, updates automaticlly every so often, or when you tell it (for the default it's usually like every 3 days maybe or something like that) Anyways, I guess you'll just see which one you like more... and don't forget to post to say which! haha.

I use Avast! and am quite pleased.

Try AVG.com it is completely free with free updates. I installed it on my computer and I run XP. It found three viruses where Norton had not. I am really happy with it. I don't plan on renewing Norton when it expires.

sophos antivirus is good and free, but you have to dig for the download location and have to fill out some reg info (w/ a valid email addy) to d/l it....

I've used AVG in the past and it is great

Personally, I use McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0, it does a good job and is provided through my university's site licensing

I've tried both AVG and Avast. In my experience AVG uses less RAM (very little), while Avast uses quite a bit more. The big pro for Avast is that it gets and updates its definitions by itself, without user interaction (this is very important if the user is computer illiterate).

At virusbulletin and ICSA the two seem to have got about the same grades. I have never had any virus when using any of those two, so I don't know how good they are in real life.

AntiVir Personal Edition is my choice!

+ frequent updates
+ uses few resources
+ no bloat (e-mail scanning is left out)
+ nice umbrella logo ;)

- rather big update files (soemtimes 1000KB+)

German IT magazine c't just printed a review of the current AV market. Out of the free alternatives, they recommend AVG or AntiVir. AVG has the larger functionality and speed and only AVG supports checking mails transmitted or received using Thunderbird. They dissuade from Bitdefender and F-Prot (cmdline only) because of their lack of an on-access scanner in the free editions. Bitdefender may be used as a secondary tool (if you *do* regular on-demand checks) because its heuristic search is really good and the vendor provides very frequent and fast signature updates.

Oh, and btw: They check each scanner against the current in-the-wild list of known viruses. Avast was one of the few scanners that didn't catch all of them!

My vote goes to ClamAV and F-prot on linux.

In my op the best antivirus for XP is :

format c:

FREE from Microsoft "XP Security".
As of January 6th
Download the new security program at microsoft.com
They will update monthly?
Why didn't they include it in the original offering?