Best Free Anti Virus Software: Virus and Spyware Protection for Windows

Is your PC looking a little green? We examine three of the best free anti virus solutions for keeping your Windows computer free of spyware and viruses.

Whether you’re looking to protect a brand new PC, or remove any annoying virus that has managed to sneak on to your laptop, anti-virus software is essential. But buying anti-virus software can get expensive, especially after you start racking up the yearly subscription charges you’ll need to stay up to date. Fortunately, a handful of companies offer very effective free anti-virus solutions – many even outstrip competing commercial packages in detection rates and scan speed. Here are a few of our favorites.

Avira AntiVir Free Edition

Avira not only offers a slick, non-invasive interface and quick scan rates, it boasted one of the best detection rates in AV Comparatives’ on-demand scan benchmarks, netting 99.4 percent of all the viruses it was exposed to. Unfortunately, it also produces more false positives than some of the other packages, and the free version will hit you with a once-a-day popup nagging you to pay for the full version.

Avast Home Edition Free Anti Virus

Avast offers offers a completely free version of its Home Edition virus protection for non-commercial use. Although it’s free for life, Avast requires users to register (for free) in order to keep using it past 60 days. This package manages to outdo Avira on two fronts: scan speed and false detection rates. It topped AV Comparatives’ speed testing with a blazing fast 17.4 MB/s scan speed, and almost the lowest number of false positives in the group. It also retains an outstanding 98 percent detection rate, better than many commercial packages like McAfee and Norton.

AVG Free Edition Anti Virus

One of the original free anti-virus programs is still one of the most popular, even though it lags behind our prior two choices on most fronts. AVG detected only 94 percent of viruses in an on-demand scan, and has among the slower scan speeds – only 6.8 MB/s. However, it also ranked close to Avast in the low number of false positives churned up, and in the big scheme of protection suites, none of its stats are too bad.