What is a good antivirus program I should use?

Use one of the free ones. check CNET.com for some reviews, and make your choice.

Norton, it my be a little expensive, but in my opinion its the best out there.
Look up all the porn you want my frend.

The Nortons just put a virus on my wife’s laptop, so I would stay away from those idiots.
Yes, the virus came from Nortons.

Norton is a virus. So are the other bloated commercial ones.

Microsoft Security Essentials is well reviewed

Norton and the other paid programs essentially ARE viruses, slowing down your machine and periodically demanding your credit card number.

Another vote for MSE if you use Windows. Remarkably, Microsoft finally made a good AV program.

I trust Avira. It’s always near/at the top of the list in detection(always >99%) and has great heuristics to discover new/mutant strains so that it can function far better than the competition even if you don’t update it for a couple of weeks. It’s light on the system, pretty quick to scan, and the AV part is free. The only real downside is that every time the free version updates, there is a pop-up ad to upgrade to the full suite, but I consider that a small price to pay for the type of protection it gives.

G Data also scores pretty well. Norton, McAfee, Microsoft, and AVG don’t fare nearly as well.

I would recommend downloading AVG and Comodo. They’re free and work really well.

One word…. Avast. The free product is excellent. For $20 the pro version is a bargain. DO NOT, even for a moment, consider Symantec – Norton products. They will screw your machine up worse than _________ (fill in the blank). AVG is good. Avast is better.

Avast = Detection rate of 97.3% and heuristics rating of 29%
AVG = 94.2% and heuristics of 34%
Avira = 99.3% and heuristics of 54%
MSE = 96.3% and heuristics of 59%
Norton = 98.6% and heuristics of 43%

I think that the numbers speak for themselves.

@jerv Except that there are non-overlapping hits between products.

Norton is a CPU and system resource hog. But they’ve been slowly improving that with each release. Still, with my new PC, I deleted the free trial Norton that it came with and installed Microsoft Security Essentials.

I’ve had good luck with both Webroot and Kaspersky antivirus programs. I’d highly recommend them, but they are above your $25 price range.

Kaspersky is by far the best AV I have used; and I have tried all mentioned above – but for MSE. (I didn’t even know they had an AV.)

I have friends that work for Norton [symantec] and they even think it is a cluster-f nightmare app.

@ipso – Yes, MS created their own AV. You can download it for free from here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ But I think you need to have Windows 7 (I’ve heard it may work with Vista or XP, but not certain). Reviews that I’ve read say that it’s as good as any of the top AV brands such as Norton, AVG, Bit Defender, etc.

BitDefender 2010 in my opinion is the best AV. Norton is horrid, talk about resource hog and then trying to get the thing off the cpu is a pain.

Indeed! To uninstall Norton, I had to go to the Symantec site and download a utility to remove it.

Another vote for MSE. By the way, @HungryGuy, it does work just fine on XP, I’ve been running it on my laptop for around a year or so.

Thanks @HungryGuy & @BhacSsylan for the info! I’ll install when my tank runs dry.

I’m with @earthduzt too. BitDefender is my #2 pick. Solid program.

@dpworkin Please elaborate. If I read you correctly, you are saying that each one lets different things through and that that is bad. The way I see it, letting less stuff through is better than letting more stuff through; who cares if Norton lets one particular virus through that AVG stops if AVG lets three others through?
Is that what you are saying? And am I wrong for preferring 99.3% effectiveness over 96.3%?

No, I was suggesting that one might wish to make a sweep with more than one.

@dpworkin Ah. Of course, having multiple AV programs resident sometimes causes conflicts. Anti-virus programs don’t play as well together as anti-spyware stuff. On-demand scanning is a different matter, but I don’t feel like going on at length right now, especially not to you (a person who probably already knows where I would be heading with it).

That why I use a Geek-Squad boot disk.

Um, I mean I would use one if I had such a thing, but of course I don’t because it’s proprietary.

The absolute best in terms of detection and features is Kaspersky, but I like Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) better. It’s light on features, but it’s very user-friendly, light on resources, and has a pretty darn good detection rate (only a few percentage points behind Kaspersky last time I checked) with very few false positives.

Lots of good free ones from cnet’s download.com. I use Avast! right now. Avast! updates each day. For money I would get Kaspersky as mentioned above.

RE multiple programs: one should have active at all times only one AV tool. However certain spyware removal tools can be installed and updated regularly and used occasionally to run scans to catch things that might have been missed. I have SpywareBlaster, AdAware and MalwareBytes for this purpose.

@anartist Good list, but how about Spybot S&D?

@jerv I forgot—I have that too.

@shared3 – Yup! For once, MS made a minimalist product that gets the job done without a lot of useless features (though I bet this will change as time goes on).

The latest Norton on my new machine was nagging me about everything I did, wanting to save my passwords for me (Windows already does that reletively transparently). It was driving me nuts!

The one thing that MSE lacks that Norton has that I liked was that Norton warned you if you clicked a Google search link to a phishing site. The fix for that is a toolbar called World Of Trust. It puts a little traffic light next to each Google link (GREEN = site is safe, YELLOW = most porn sites are yellow, well, just because they’re porn sites, RED = phishing or virus site).

ESET NOD32 anti-virus is a good anti-virus.You can use in your computer to save your data.

I got Avast!