What is the best Antivirus For Home Use ?

I have been using Avast free since years. Since the beginning it runs pretty light on the system, and never had slowdown issues because of it. It still runs well. If someone says that it made their PC slow, then they need to look for their configuration or some other problems.

Windows Defender makes my PC really slow, and I hate that. With new versions of Avast, I uninstall it and then install it from setup. When I uninstall Avast, Windows Defender kicks in, and my PC runs so slow with it. It boots up slow, and if you open a folder full of exes, then it will take a long time for the folder to stabilize, and show the icons.

Windows Defender can be considered a good option for general or novice users, where they just need an antivirus, and they do not have to deal with it much.

But, Defender does lack few things. Avast has web shield, which protects from malicious sites, and it has often saved me and alerted me whenever I visited any such site by mistake. Mind you, I am very careful about opening unknown sites and I observe safe practice... but being a site and forum moderator, sometimes I do have to follow links. Avast has saved me with its web shield, and I think it is a very important component. Don't feel safe without it.

Third party antivirus do offer extra protection from stuff that Defender lacks, and so an advanced or experienced user, will of course prefer the third party antivirus.

Of course, first thing is the common sense and observing safe practices, but still extra protection is always a good thing.
 
I have been using Avast free since years. Since the beginning it runs pretty light on the system, and never had slowdown issues because of it. It still runs well. If someone says that it made their PC slow, then they need to look for their configuration or some other problems.

Windows Defender makes my PC really slow, and I hate that. With new versions of Avast, I uninstall it and then install it from setup. When I uninstall Avast, Windows Defender kicks in, and my PC runs so slow with it. It boots up slow, and if you open a folder full of exes, then it will take a long time for the folder to stabilize, and show the icons.
Wouldn't trust avast. There have been multiple reports of it being snoopware. You should look at the thread posted here in this forum itself.

 
Windows defender is the best as long as you are using windows 8 or 10. I do not know about other windows
 
I knew this would come up. I am personally okay with it, or rather I choose to overlook it. What can be done?

Look, if you are on the internet these days, it is more than likely that your information/data is being harvested some way or the other. If you have a Facebook account, or Google account, and you use searches on Chrome browser while being signed in with your Google account, your information is being used by Google. Many sites offer to post comments using your Google or FB account, and many people do that, and so your information is being linked to you, and it will be used. Even if you aren't signed in to these accounts, still the searches made by your IP address are still linked.

There are many ways in which your information or your data will be used by companies.

I do not perform searches while being signed in to Google. I never post comments on sites using my Google or FB IDs. If I have to post a comment, if the site offers anonymous commenting, I do that... or by posting an email, in which case I post email created for such purposes.

I do not use Amazon shopping much.

I do not use FB much, and I never use its account to post on any site.

Your data/information will reach companies by any means whether you like it or not. You use the phone, and there you have an account, and so all activity you do is being associated with your account.

Unless you use VPN, or you are really careful and take various steps to ensure minimum data of yours is sent out, it is impossible to stop companies to harvest information about you.

I personally cannot afford to buy an antivirus every year, and also I do not want to.

In free antivirus, I think Avast is the best, which offers good overall protection. So many people still use it. It is a personal choice for me to use it. If you like, use it.. if not, then don't.

Even if Avast is selling data, why not point fingers at the companies.... big names like Google, FB, Microsoft and others for buying this data? The companies buying such data are as equally responsible as the seller itself. Google and FB are doing it for ages. Atleast Microsoft are upfront about what information they take from you. It is all about money in the end.
 
+1 for Avast. Been using it since 2007, its quite light on the system and has so far been really protective against all those stupid Flash drive malwares which would hide all the contents of the drive, malicious websites, etc
 
Well, I never used any antivirus for my system protection I always preferred
Windows 10 default antivirus protection.
It’s quite good and provides good protection against any virus or malware, Best thing is its consume less ram gives a smooth performance, and
no lag issue at window startup.

If you want more deep protection try Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, It has the potential to protect all your home pc, also it provides some extra features like a superb antivirus engine, Safepay banking protection, Wi-Fi Security Advisor, web protection.
 
Kaspersky internet security had saved me multiple times from drive-by-download malware. Opened up a site from Google search, nothing indicates that it could harbour a nasty but KIS blocked the downloads.

This antivirus also has a applications whitelist feature where you can select what programs to be allowed to run. Anything outside of that list gets blocked and you get a notification.

I've used free antiviruses in the past and they don't really seem that effective. My suspicion is that the AV companies use them to harvest infection data to improve their network based antiviral signatures.

You should also check out the antivirus benchmarks, they publish a comparative study every year.
 
my first priority will be Windows Defender, i have used Kaspersky, Quick Heal and Avast. from them i will recommended Kaspersky and Quick Heal.
 
Don't know why Windows defender persistently use a lot of memory on my laptop and the system feels sluggish.
I was forced to use a weird program Symantec endpoint protection, most online reviews basically say it's pretty heavy.But for me, it's barely noticeable, though I didn't install it myself ( installed remotely).
Yes, it's not ridiculously light like Webroot ( that's 2MB in size) but extremely light ( initially it was eating up 100-120 MB of memory, now 20 MB at most)
It's definitely lighter than Windows Defender for me. Weird!!
And the firewall has insane amount of options. In fact I spent an entire day on learning about firewall in general and tried trial versions of few paid internet security suite on an old laptop just to play around with settings and wrapping my head around this.
Nothing has this kind of crazy granular control...even the good ones like Kaspersky/ ESET/ Bit Defender.
I don't know if it's good/ bad, but working fine for me and if someone likes to tinker around the settings, it's possibly the best. But this thing is crazy expensive for personal use.
 
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Windows defender is somewhat basic protection with not so many features but actually it works good.
try ESET internet security, it's really good & light on system resources.
 
why don't you use this opportunity to teach them "what not to do in your computer".
Like give them some time to play with computer then one day thay will ask "why is computer running slow now" So then you can explain what is happening and why it is slow
I'm saying this because I assume most of the time home use computers are for browsing so thay don't have any high end specs. Whenever you install anti virus it's gone consume some resource of your computer.
less program is running in background more room to play around
just saying No Offences to anybody (don't give them fish teach them how to fish )
 
@Khushal
A lot of times the home use computers that have malware issues are the ones that we don't regularly check on. Someone else would be using them and they'd come back to you after it slows down to a crawl.

At that point figuring out what went wrong and then explaining that to them is a lot more tedious than just trying to prevent it from happening. The days of excessive toolbar installs are over, the malware these days are a lot more sneaky. You just need to visit some sites to potentially get infected, don't even have to click. People who have a tendency to let this happen also abhor any kind of restrictions to prevent this.
 
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