I have a Acer 4755G laptop with an i5-2430M (2.4 Ghz), Nvidia GT540M and 3GB RAM. I was running AVG but the latest update of 2015 version killed me laptop's performance. It would take ages to switch tabs in chrome and the performance tab in the task manager showed 2.7+ GB RAM is always being used. Getting rid of the AVG massivley improved the performance (Like 15x faster now surprisingly). But I still want to have something light instead of having no antivirus. I am trying Avast now but I plan to turn off real-time scanning and scan manually once in a while since I am computer saavy, know what I am doing most of the time and I rarely click on random links. Just wanted to hear from the community on which they think is a light but decent free antivirus for windows.
p.s. I plan on upgrading by RAM to 6 GB by the end of this month. But I still want something light and decent.
I was using AVG since 2012. And it made my laptop slower and slower over time. I formatted my laptop and it still went back to being slow. I know AVG is the problem because after uninstalling the 2015 version, my laptop is now superfast like how it should be.
I unchecked all their extra tools including software updater, NG, home network security, web and email protection, etc when doing a custom install. I just need its basic virus shield, nothing more. So far, my laptop is smooth as it was without an antivirus and avast real-time protection is on. Gonna see how it goes in the next few days.
Don't forget about Avast is the boot-time scan mode; so even if you find it going to slow with the main shield just turn it off and schedule a boot time scan every week or so to be safe!
Thus far the best antivirus I've found is CommonSense 2015, but some have reported that it is difficult to configure. I haven't had much experience with anything else, unfortunately.
+1 I supplement this with the free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and CCleaner. I run these applications on an as needed basis. My computer is as fast and healthy now as when I first built it, even more so since I stopped using resource hogging antivirus programs.
I'm a fan of Bitdefender. In the past I've used Avast! and AVG. I used to be a big supporter of AVG but they jumped on the bulky and annoying ads everywhere bandwagon. Avast! was always annoying as shit to me. Constant ads and pop ups and even before all that the program was really intrusive. Bitdefender just quietly sits there plugging along doing its job in the background like it should. Only alerts you when there is potentially a serious issue. It's been great so far for me.
I use Avira, but do not have much experience with it. It takes up aprox 50MB of RAM in task manager and i dont even know its running. The scanning is fast and everything it founds goes to quarantene where you can work with it further - recover it, ignore, delete, etc...
If anyone has more in-depth experience, I would love to hear it.
No matter what, I always suggest Spybot Search and Destroy (1.6.2) WITHOUT the explorer and tea time protection enabled as a scanner that you should run once in awhile (weekly?, depending on your browsing habits). I haven't found a straight anti-virus that is free that I like, as the ones that don't miss half the stuff that's thrown at it are so resource heavy its beyond belief. I know its not free, but I use and normally recommend Kaspersky Anti-Virus. Its fairly light on the system, and does a very good job as an anti-virus. You can get a 30 day trial to check it out (30 days for each product they have gives you quite a bit of time to decide, 3-4 months), then if you like it, its around 30-40 dollars for three licenses. Symantec (norton) hasn't been any good for a few years, McAfee is VERY resource heavy, Trend (whatever they are calling their A/V now) isn't any better than the free ones, CA is complete crap, Avast is light but misses things occasionally (new threats mostly), AVG will slow your system down more and more the longer its on there, MalWare Bytes does OK once you actually are infected. There are a lot of choices, but the problem is, there isn't really a perfect one.
