I use Ad Aware and Malwarebytes on my PC. I once used Kaspersky but I find that it takes too much resources and almost every time tries to interrupt everything that I'm doing, even the simple act of visiting some obscure website can lead to an emergency with that anti virus.
Formerly, I was a strong fan of AVG. But after it deleted an important corrupt file of mine (thinking it was a virus) instead of repairing it, I stopped using it. Currently I use Avast and it seems to do the job I want. But this does not affect the level of respect I have for AVG in terms strength. It is just that this anti-virus is too harsh for my liking.
When I bought my last laptop from a local guy with a small computer shop, he installed free virus protection in my computer. That was three years ago, and I have never had a problem. I regularly clean my computer the way he showed me. It's really easy and safe. It's called spybot.
I've been using AVG for many years without much trouble, and I do really like the interface in it's latest version - it's very clear and easy to navigate. However I recently had to reformat my computer because something was screwed up with it, and if it was some sort of virus or malware, it apparently slipped past AVG, and none of the other scans I ran with any other antivirus programs would catch it either. It also could have just been my registry or some other files somehow became corrupted beyond repaid as well - I have no idea. However after this reformat, I decided to try out some of the other antiviruses out there to see if I was missing anything. I would say the best of the bunch appeared to be Trend Micro imo - it had one of the highest detection rates, and for the most part it did not seem to hog up my system resources - with one big exception though which I will get to shortly. It too had a very clear and easy to navigate interface and felt polished, and it was easy to drill down into the options, such as giving exclusions to certain programs. Unfortunately, I ran into two problems with it which made it unusable for me - it has compatibility issues with another program I rely on, Sandboxie, as well as the Adobe suite of programs, particularly After Effects. No matter what I did, what settings I changed, nor what I excluded from Trend Micro, it would literally lock my whole computer up if I tried to render an animation in After Effects. Right now I am back to using AVG, but of the ones I tried, I would say Kapersky, Trend Micro and to a lesser extent, Avira, were all pretty solid. Avira was a bit buggy at times in my tests, with some features turning on or off without me explicitly doing so - but it's improved a lot since when I tried it out many years ago. It used to be major nag-ware with constant pop ups pressuring you to buy the full version. This newer version, not so much.
I use Symantec's Norton 360 for my Windows PC. It is very effective at what it's doing, the downside is that it tends to delete your downloads if it sees anything it thinks is suspicious (e.g a file that hasn't been downloaded by anyone in the community before). Leaving that aside, it finds a lot of viruses that otehr
I like Panda. It's never let me down. I had a program on my computer that I couldn't get rid of. It took a few scans before it worked, but it did get rid of it completely not too long later.
I haven't used an antivirus or antispyware program on my computers for the past five or six years. I don't find them necessary because I know what I'm doing with my machines. I'll run the default Windows Defender from time to time, but I haven't had a virus rear its head for years now. The average person is better off using some program or another, though.
In my PC, I used Avast, but it seems like getting one for a charge was more expensive than ESET. Hence, I used ESET. So far, ESET does not give me any problems. I was able to check into financial online accounts like my stock portfolio account. Plus, for a very affordable price, I get good antivirus and security. I am definitely going to purchase ESET since the one I am currently using is a free trial.
I'm using Avast for the sole reason that it's free. Additionally, it's easy to manage and does what it's required just like other anti-virus programs. My 1 year free Trend Micro subscription already expired and viruses kept invading my OS. Wherever you look - Kaspersky, Avira, Norton - you see an expensive anti-virus software. So I decided to install Avast and I've had no problems so far (I hope this program won't betray me after a year or so of use). The viruses that irked me months ago are nowhere to be found.
Normally I use Norton, but now I know it's not the best out there anymore. I found out that when you get a virus the people who give you the virus can take over Norton so when you look at it, it says that you don't have a virus. I think that's just crazy because I didn't know that I had a virus on my laptop. So, from there I decided to get a different one. The one that I use now is called Sophos, and I got it at Staples. It works great because it does everything that needs to be done, in the background. I hate having to do updates and clean out my laptop because then I can't use it. This one doesn't do anything like that, it does everything in the background so that's great.
