Best free Virus Scanner and Firewall?

[rookie]

Another vote for Avira for virus scanning. http://www.free-av.com/

[fuzzweed]

2 cents worth:
I always used AVG but it went a bit pesterware at one point so I changed to Avast - but I found that that really slowed my machines down. Went back to AVG after a while. Don't know if they had chnaged anything in the meantime, but it now sits silently doing what it's supposed to again.

[reven]

just read online armor doesnt support vista 64, so that firewall is out of the running...

[rookie]

Something to consider is detection rate. Check out this report:

[INDENT]http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/er...008_08.php[/INDENT]

Seems the link doesn't work from the forums, but will work if you cut and paste. Sorry for
the inconvenience.

[mian]

I used AVG and Zonealarm for years. But eventually ZA started giving me slowdowns like the other user. There's an older version that's probably safe enough even without updates that wouldn't have that crap going on, but who knows how old. A new enough version might also be okay. I didn't actually switch anything until AVG8 came out. I had crashes on one computer after install, an installation on another computer that just kept breaking (it would work fine for a few days, and then refuse to load leaving my unprotected until I reinstalled, and then reinstalled it again, and then...). They had, at least for a while, stopped updating the virus definitions for people using 7.5, although I think they started those up again, at least for a while. I gather I wasn't the only one experiencing avg8 problems--which may, for the record, be all fixed by now--it's been months since I bothered with avg.

So I switched to Comodo. It will probably do what you want, but on the antivirus side, it picks up an awful lot of false positives. I have a lot of video editing and compression type programs, and things like mpeg2repair and some of Super's codecs come up as viruses--not as being infected with a real virus, but with some heuristic looking code. I haven't learned to mess with the sensitivity enough to avoid those kinds of errors without compromising safety yet, though it is easy enough to ask it to ignore particular items you know are not threatening. If you've used anti-virus for years and are familar with malware naming and antivirus functions, the false positive thing won't bother you.

I mainly like Comodo because it's firewall and antivirus in one, and both update smoothly and without complications. I preferred Zonealarm's interface, especially for per-program blocking, but it isn't as if Comodo's interface is bad, I just preferred ZA's.

[reven]

thanks guys, i settled on avast for anti virus and comodo for the firewall.

dont know how to make comodo ask permission for every program before it accesses the internet though... (some ask, some dont, no browser has asked yet...)

[HarryH3]

Some firewall software automatically allows known browsers access to the net. Perhaps that it why comodo didn't ask about them?