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.

[pam]

I've just bought new system with Win 8 on and it seems to 'like' Norton Suite. I was running the trial version but find it unobtrusive so have paid subscription of £14.99 for the year. With my old xp system I ran Avast (free) all the time without any gliches, but not sure if Avast AV has caught up with Windows 8 yet. One thing which did annoy me with Avast was the continual advertising which showed on updates being DL. It was all self advertising mind, but still got sick of it. Plus my machine slowed down during updating, whereas I'm finding Norton Suite does non of this. But it's each to their own.

[Anonymous]

About 12 years ago I bought Norton Anti-Virus 2001, the bloody thing killed my computer! Never again.

[Liquid]

I had issues with norton with my first computer:( they're a lot better but I'm still fearful of an antivirus quarantining a system critical.

[Anonymous]

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@sheepdog wrote:
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.

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No, I meant without any additional firewall software!

As for Windows 7 firewall, I havent had to touch it and can only assume that its on as I've never actually checked!

The two piece sof advise I can give you all (as someone who works in IT Security) are:

1. DO NOT pay for your antivirus software, particularly Norton/Symantec! There are plenty of free alternatives out there.
2. Make sure you update all yoru software! Make sure Windows Update are on and configured, make sure your Antivirus software is updating, and make sure any other pieces of software such as Adobe reader, Java, iTunes, etc are all updated when they ask to update.

Point 2 is probably the most important one, so long as you keep all yoru software up to date it gives malicious software less of a chance of gaining access to your machine.

p.s. This goes for Mac users as well, they are just as likely to have malicious software on them as a Windows PC contrary to popular opinion!