Best Free AV

On Tue, 4 Jul 2017 09:46:28 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

I know this has been asked before, but I haven't
dealt with AV for awhile. Avast keeps timing
out and I'm not sure there's any longer a fully
free version. Sophos requires (at least) signing
up with personal info. (Even the signup page has
a tracker from Facebook.) AVG was bought by
Avast and seems to be adware. (According to
MajorGeeks.)

Is there any decent, no-funny-business, free
AV still available? I want to just download a
real installer and run it, without any signup, online
installers, ads, etc.


I'm a little late to this discussion but I was in the middle of a mess
and trying to be sure of what was happening and what was going to
work.

I've had Panda Free on a XP SP3 PC (only occasionally used) and on 2
Win 7 SP1 64-bit PCs since late 2015. Until last week they were fine.
No issues or problems.

Then on 06/26/17, When shutting down Windows XP, there was an
unexpected warning to not shut it off because Panda was updating to
the latest version. Never got the courtesy of them asking or giving a
heads up before it was too late. I waited for it to finish but it
never did and there was no disk activity. Reluctantly I powered down
and back up and it wouldn't finish booting. After a long time and
many reboots I managed to get to the desktop and started a System
Restore.

That took forever but eventually worked. I removed all traces of
Panda and started looking for a different AV to use. Decided on
Bitdefender Free but that won't work on XP so I loaded AVG. That's
working OK but it's a lame interface with very few settings options.

Bitdefender Free in now on both Win 7 PCs and seems be ok.

Bottom line here is that I was impressed by the reviews of Bitdefender
Free and they seem to be valid. Panda reviews say it's gone down hill
in performance/effectiveness.

DC

wrote

| Bitdefender Free in now on both Win 7 PCs and seems be ok.
|
| Bottom line here is that I was impressed by the reviews of Bitdefender
| Free and they seem to be valid. Panda reviews say it's gone down hill
| in performance/effectiveness.
|

Thanks. Useful info. FredW mentioned that
Bitdefender requires signup. Not a real big deal,
but I try to avoid such things. The only reason
for it is to send spam, sell your name, etc.
And it's hard to know ahead of time how intrusive
they might end up being.... or what company
might buy them out and then change their terms.

On 2017-07-07, Mayayana wrote:
Thanks. Useful info. FredW mentioned that
Bitdefender requires signup. Not a real big deal,
but I try to avoid such things. The only reason
for it is to send spam, sell your name, etc.

You can always use a fake name and a throwaway email address.

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"Roger Blake" wrote

| You can always use a fake name and a throwaway email address.
|

Yes. But I prefer to avoid the sleaze if possible.
And there's usually a mild breach of contract in
using a fake name. I'd rather deal with entities that
don't require me to be dishonest. Fortunately, in a
lot of cases companies are happy to give things
away no-strings, as a marketing device. "Loss
leaders" that might lead to lucrative commercial
contracts.