Microsoft Securtiy Essentials

No virus scanner is perfect, but whatever you do don't use two of them (they will conflict with each other).
ZoneAlarm extreme works for me (not free). AVG is OK as well. Still like security essentials I wouldn't taint it as other virus scanners have massive faults as well.
 
IMHO if you don't pay you get what you are given, however I've yet to see a virus scanner that does a perfect job paid or unpaid. Trend Micro perhaps...

 
And what about "Microsoft Safety Scanner" (that you have to download, and expires after 10 days) ?

If you don't do a 'Detailed' scan with MSE it can miss items. For me the difference in time is substantial, say 15 minutes for the 'quick' scan and 12 hours for the 'detailed' one. If any problems are detected I will then run MalwareBytes and it may pick up a couple of items.
 
My attitude is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care so I am obsessive about where I go and once I am someplace what I click on. Any site I might end up on that is at all dodgy is a shutdown and full scan...immediately
 
Regards,

 
Yes, but i use it from time to time, as a supplement to MSE (whom I should maybe change for Avast for better results - ?!), as it seems for complete and up to date.
[about Microsoft Safety Scanner]

> Kaspersky
 
My totally biased opinion is to avoid this, had several bad experiences :)
 
Review of antivirus products here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372364,00.asp
 
 
 
 

Well let me eat my words, ZoneAlarm still uses Kasperspy. So I am still running Kasperspy engine... backpeddle.... OK it's great!!! ;)
 
> but I sometimes wonder about the methodology of these tests.
 
The debate would be 100 times more lengthy than 64 bit precision engine.

Colin, did you look to see what kinds of threats those 111 hits were? Most likely they were tracking cookies and other mostly innocuous things, and probably not things that were contributing to your slowness. The real culprit's more likely to be some legitimate process, perhaps even antivirus or firewall software, or Windows Automatic Updates. Windows itself is, after all, the most pernicious of viruses.

Sycraft
MSE is pretty low comparatively, given that they don't update all that aggressively and want to never have false positives.

Maybe that is why Microsoft offers also Microsoft Safety Scanner, as a complement to MSE ?
 
 

Yup antivirus and the weather are related :)
 
But hey, enough about what I think, here is a message from John McAfee:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
 
 

>  why not pick one to do the realtime protection and use the others for periodical scans?
I wouldn't recommend this... See #2. I guess you could get into complicating disabling and re-enabling etc but I don't see the point, and a lot of virus scanner often continue running even though they indicate they are disabled.

Bob Bone - I've been using Avast with I think pretty acceptable results so far. No speed reduction noticeable if it's on or off.

brconflict
I usually read reviews on the top 5-10 anti-virus/Internet Security solutions and jump ship often. The point being is that each year, they're all competing and some shoot out from the rest as being on top. This year, I'm subscribed to Bit-Defender, which I find quite easy to use, and seems to protect my PC quite well.
 
Sometimes, the ones I avoid are the ones that were acquired, such as Norton (Symantec), Trend-Micro (Cisco), and others that just are dated. Many times, the new-comers are more innovative and seem to avoid time-costing change-management for patches, etc. and hire more inventive and energetic talent so they can more quickly respond to threats and without as much red-tape. Sometimes the under-dog is better. Sometimes the bigger ship simply floats over small seeds that grow into bad problems, and are slow to respond. Sure, the smaller companies are less likely to be responsible, but they do want to take over. They aim to do just that, because they know where the larger ant-virus companies fail. 

I try to avoid the ones where the owner of the company is on the run for murdering his neighbor over a dog's barking.  (seems like their ability to focus may be impacted a wee tiny bit)
 
Bob Bone
 

You got me, Alex - I didn't look at the link. :)
 
Bob Bone
 

For my DAW, under windows 8.1, I use the included Defender.  Same for my office computer.  Savvy users are usually fairly safe with this.  Less savvy ones need to be protected from themselves with something a bit more aggressive plus need some amount of training about what not to click.  We prefer ESET NOD for our business customers - especially where central monitoring is needed.  McAfee and Symantec tend to be bloated and over-zealous.
 
We have actually setup virtual machines with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 8 and then literally performed tons of searches and clicked on everything - win free ipods, get help from a cartoon ape ads, etc :).  We weren't able to infect the systems.  Yet, we see people every week with all sorts of "fake AV" type scare-ware infections, FBI viruses, etc.
 
As an aside, backups are super important these days with some of the nasty stuff that's going around, like the much reported Cryptolocker.  If you get this one and don't have a data backup, you're kinda screwed.
 
If you want a good third-party look at the whole lot of most popular packages out there, you can find one here with some great reports.  Based on this, you can see that it's about a separation of about 6% or so between the low end (the out of the box MSE/Defender) and the best option.  Here's the link - it's worth a look: http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php (this is the "real-world" test result - it's a dynamic report/chart).
 
Hope the helps.

Blades
As an aside, backups are super important these days with some of the nasty stuff that's going around, like the much reported Cryptolocker.  If you get this one and don't have a data backup, you're kinda screwed.

+1... also you want backup drives not connected to the machine unless backing things up... that one supposedly will encrypt any connected device it can get to.