Right antivirus reccomendations?

[Liquid]

Since avg seems to have dropped the ball on me(probaly my fault as well) I have been infected with a beautiful bit of malware that's downloading new viruses to its hearts content:( currently running a bootable malwarebytes disk in the hope it catches it(fingers crossed).

Thankfully my backups stay true to their word and are in perfect working order (phew!!).

Unfortunatly I've now lost a days work:(

Anyone got any good reccomendations? For a free firewall/antivirus? If need be ill pay but I've spent enough this month haha.

[Liquid]

Avg have been perfect until now:(

Probally my bad as I costed a not so legit website for a tutorial on app analytics.

[Anonymous]

Panda Cloud Antivirus Free

[adamtemp64]

Symantec Cloud Endpoint protection. (paid for) Is installed on all the work Pc's and not that expensive £45.60 per pc covered for 3 years http://www.symantec.com/endpoint-protection-small-business-edition-2013?fid=symantec-cloud note the free 30 day trial

[Anonymous]

@Liquid........so there's 5 recommendations....any wiser because I'm not !!

I've seen so many threads on the various forums over the years asking the same question and always there are 6 - 10 suggestions as to the best AV.

In the end it's what "suits you Sir"....I've changed AV 4 times in 8 years.

[adamtemp64]

some very usefull comparison data here http://www.av-test.org/en/home/

and the awards went to http://www.av-test.org/en/test-procedures/award/2012/

[sheepdog]

If you're running Win 7 or higher then you might as well stick with MS Essentials defender or whatever it is. Providing you have set your user accounts to non-admin then you'll be fine. Otherwise I'm really happy with Comodo firewall on my XP systems. Though I do tend to stick with Comodo Dragon browser these days after Firefox got exploited and almost broke my work laptop.

[Anonymous]

AVG certainly did drop the ball a few years ago when they introduced all of the bloatware into their software which just slowed computers down.

Norton/Symantec also slows computers down and I always advise people to stay away from this software, not least because they have to pay for it when there are plenty of free alternatives out there.

I have been using Avast! Free Edition for the last few years on Windows 7 64bit at home without a firewall and have never had a single problem. I should also probably mention that I work in IT Security so if its good for me...(I must also note that this isn't the software we use at my place of work lol)

[sheepdog]

You actually switch the firewall off in Win7? I've found it relatively unobtrusive till I want to try and figure out how to allow ports through then give up trying.

[Anonymous]

I use Comodo anti-virus and Firewall, it's good but only because my Brother thinks I download too much virus infested crap so he's set the Firewall to question EVERYTHING I download, even songs from legal MP3 sites such as Amazon.

[Liquid]

Haha yes comodo can be secure to the point of basically just unplugging the network.

I've gone for comodo for now and paid for Hitman pro(mainly because it saved my computer while others hadnt a clue.)

Thanks for all the reccomendations.

I stay away from windows firewall as I cannot work it out. It doesn't show popups when blocking a connection and for the brief period I was using it it blocked everything not on a default port(yh ok good thing I guess) which makes it annoying not knowing if there's a service error rather to find out its been locked out without mention:(