NO antivirus on my computer

[Moira]

Yes, there is a free version of Zone Alarm. You can download it here

[AngelicKnight]

I'm honestly not a fan of ZoneAlarm. I was big on it when I was fresh into the IT world, during my college years, but nowadays if a computer isn't already behind a hardware firewall, I just run Windows Firewall. It seems to do surprisingly well for an M$ app. I suppose ZA does its job, I'm probably just burned out from the dozens of remote users I couldn't remote into because they installed it, didn't know jack about configuring it, and couldn't figure out for the life of them how to turn it off.

[Ippersiel]

About Comodo Firewall > I'm currently using it on a Vista machine so it's another option to use.

And nobody mentioned AntiVir from Avira? www.free-av.com It's saved me several times from testing items with infections. My only gripe is the pop-up ad during updates from Avira to buy it.

Edit:

Ouroboros:

Free antivirus - McAfee

Not free - ZoneAlarm Security Suite

Hey Ouroboros, are you talking about the online scanner or a downloadable copy like AVG & AntiVir?

[AngelicKnight]

My only gripe is the pop-up ad during updates from Avira to buy it.

Ugh, that's enough reason to steer me away from it.

As far as free AVs go, anytime someone has brought me their computer from home to work on, I just slapped AVG on it. I've never had any trouble with it, and it's always proved just as reliable as McAfee and Symantec. Honestly, on that note I don't see how they're still making profit off of home users given you can get the same thing for free -- except for the lack of knowledge of such alternatives.

However, I've ran with Avast as well, and was pretty pleased with it. It seems pretty solid, though I haven't touched it in a year or two.

[Moira]

I like Avast and still have a copy of Sygate when it was still free. I agree, Zone Alarm gave me problems, after a while it used to cut out the internet. It could be restarted by closing Zone Alarm, getting the net back and re-opening it, but my kids used to not bother restart it. Which made it pointless as a firewall!

[The Organized Resistance]

I don't even remember what anti-virus I used. I did the same thing and got a trial version from some site or another, but I ended up deleting it for reasons that I'm not entirely sure of.

I will toss my two sense in on this in this, and this only:

If you are a pirate, or to be politically correct, "file-sharer", and you think that your computer is safe, then you're not looking hard enough.

Arrrrr.

[Cider]

Haha. Antivirus's like Panda www.pandasecurity.com have "Truprevent technologies". I dont really understand the concept but there virus database is huge! It is abit resource intensive but does the ideal job.

[Moira]

I totally agree with The Organised Resistance. p2p file sharing and using torrent sites are the fastest way to pick up viruses and spyware and if these are your favoured activities, you must use some sort of AV software!

[Cider]

I totally agree with that statement, using p2p sites have skyrocket my virus detection

[JPnyc]

I use panda's online scan as a 2nd opinion. In fact I ran an old box for around 8 yrs with no onboard AV, just using pandascan and trendmicro, combined with safe habits and just about everything disabled in my browser.