Rwy in Sight,
Paid ahead of free any day of the week.
Simple reason being you are paying for their teams, both in terms of software development and rolling out virus definitions pronto. It takes money and good teams to do anti-virus properly .... good analysts don't work for free when the basic starting salary is easily £50k/$70k per annum upwards depending on experience ! (plus generous benefits)
If you think about it, with paid stuff, as well as the software developer's own teams, you're also getting the benefit of viruses being identified early by corporate and government customers !
The latest AV comparatives confirm it, with Avast averaging 96.6% detection, which doesn't sound bad ... but bear in mind that puts them in 12th place well behind the commercial guys such as Kaspersky who average 99.4% detection, or current leader Trend Micro at 99.8%. And with anti-virus, well... I'm sure you'll agree, the closer to 100% the better, because one missed one can do a lot of damage !
Avast also scored lousily in false-positives ... 120 false positives vs 6 false positives at Kaspersky or 7 false positives at Fsecure.
BUT .... steer clear of McAfee.
FSecure is great, it uses multiple scanning engines and they've got a great team behind them. Quality product.
Kaspersky is also great, super fast on getting out new virus definitions, one of the fastest in the industry .... but depends on your personal geo-political preferences in terms of dealing with a Russian company.
Last edited by mixture; 28th January 2015 at 18:33.