[Question] Free Antivirus Apps - Which of 3 are Better?

ZoneAlarm 6 vsmon is running ~6,500K on my machine

not bad... is that the free version? How's the virtual memory usage?

#303970

My Protection setup is:

AVG

NvFirewall (built in on my A8N-SLi)

Lavasoft Ad-Aware

...and my own knowledge of what should and should not appear in the task manager.

#303973

yes, that's the free version.

i'm not sure exactly how to look at virtual memory (this is one area of computers i'm pretty clueless about lol) but performance is good. i have noticed a definite improvement since i got rid of mcafee. neither zonealarm nor AVG lags when updating either, which is nice. when i was using mcafee, even navigating the program, securitycenter or whatnot, would lag me sometimes. no problems like that yet with zonealarm.

#303976

hi blankfaze, to check out VM Size... go to your windows Task Manager and select the "Processes" Tab.

You may find that the column does not exist, in that case, go to the "View" Dropdown menu, choose "Select Columns" and at the new window.. Check "Virtual Memory Size"

You may find some other useful metrics there.. another good one is "handles" as you can spot misbehaving processes with suspicious handle counts...

Process Handle Counts

A common programming error is to neglect to close handles when they are no longer needed; this can result in resource leakage, which in turn can degrade performance, cause program failures, and even impact other processes.

here is a neat little debugging article that talks a little about Handle Resource leaks: http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/debug/memo...icle.php/c4411/

#304057

avast in awesome

#305850

Why in the world is this NOT a poll?

avast has worked well for me in the past. but im currently using norton; which is a huge memory hog. I plan on switching back.

#305884

hhaha... didn't even cross my mind... would it be too late to start a poll now?

Edit: I've never done one before, I wonder if it's too late to add that capability to an existing thread.

#305898

Well i was using avg which was working pretty good.. but now i switched to avast after seeing this since i wanted to try it out.. but seems avast does a pretty good job.. and uses a little bit less mem then avg i think.. at least from what i saw..

plus avast is skinable though i dont' look at that window that often hehe..

#305935

we need a poll on this...

which do most people use?

im considering avg...but everyone is saying everything is good- I've got a license for Norton- but it is slow and heavy...

ahh heck!- best virus protection: A MAC.

#336669

i prefer AntiVir Personal Edition it is tiny and slim and it found the most virus i hat.

good look

#336709