Best free anti-virus software? and Open Office?

[merlin34baseball]

Hello computer geniuses!

Could someone tell me what they think the best free anti-virus software is? I refuse to pay Norton again for another subscription when there are so many other options out there.

Also does anyone have experience with Open Office? I'm not paying Microsoft for Office, and am stuck with Works at the moment!

Thanks!
Merlin34

[ycleption]

I've used AVG for awhile, and haven't had any problems with it. AVG Free Advisor - Free antivirus and anti-spyware downloads

I've also used Open Office, and I generally enjoy it, there are a few things that bug me, but if you aren't doing super fancy things it works great.

[Hellblazer]

i'm using Nod32, its not free but it's good. Avg I heard good things too.

[Lareth]

I use AVG on my desktop and AVAST on my laptop.  Both are pretty good, Avast has a slightly spiffier looking interface, but they both perform equally well, haven't had a Virus issue in over 2 years using them.

[darkstorme]

You also might want to look into Clamwin.  Rated best open-source anti-virus for five years running now, and has a higher rating on "bugs caught" tests than McAfee or a number of other professional anti-virii.  (Anti-viruses?)

I would personally recommend Open Office.  It's flexible, the latest version is tighter than ever, and it can do a number of things that Office cannot.  The one thing that it doesn't tend to do well is save its documents in standard Office filetypes with WYSIWYG conversion.  They come out a little differently, and occasionally need some format corrections if someone is working on a Writer document in Word.  Even so, I've no real complaints.

And, if you're picking up some nice, open-source tools, I also recommend Thunderbird in place of Outlook, The Gimp in place of... well, any photo editing program you currently use, PDF Creator... just 'cause it's nice to be able to create ANY document as a PDF, and Thumbview so you can see your NWN screenshots without having to open them in a graphics editor.

I have more; just ask.

[Krell Himmler]

Antivir is great. It's a professional level antivirus that is sold to corporations/companies worldwide and is known for great quality....It is free for personal use.

[Filatus]

Antivir is great. It's a professional level antivirus that is sold to corporations/companies worldwide and is known for great quality....It is free for personal use.

I use it as well and so far it's been a good choice.

[Weeblie]

I've used F-Secure for a few years and it has always been my choice. Okay, it's not free, but it's good...

I've tested AVG before, but noticed that it was slowing the computer down more than F-Secure (I suppose, only when it comes to launching apps or similiar that required disk access).

[socbehsci]

I use avast on both my laptop and desktop. Im not very nerdy.. but I havent had any problems with it and its user friendly.

[Chazzler]

Avast! antivirus has been my choice as well. free to download, install and so on, but requires a free registration that gives you a 1-year subscription to virus definition downloads. And the subscription can be renewed easily after a year, by just making a new request for a key. The registration does not ask much information though

For added protection I recommend Spybot - Search & Destroy from www.safer-networking.net and Ad-Aware 2007 from Ad-Aware @ Lavasoft - The Original Anti-Spyware Company - Lavasoft

Read: http://forums.layonara.com/848622-post8.html for details on the properties of Spybot - S&D.

[Verideth]

Hiya folks.

I recommend AVG. I have not had any problems with it either.

As for spyware. I have found spybot is not very current and does a great job messing with any active MySql servers out there. Not a big deal if you are not running a server or communicting alot from or to your PC.

As for Ad-Aware. The free version has an exclusion list. Certain companies pay them to not be stopped. So it has some obvious holes in it.

I recommend Windows Defender. If you have a valid copy of Windows you can get it here:

Download details: Windows® Defender

[Hellblazer]

You also might want to look into Clamwin.  Rated best open-source anti-virus for five years running now, and has a higher rating on "bugs caught" tests than McAfee or a number of other professional anti-virii.  (Anti-viruses?)

Err I don't know fo you but I have been trying it today, and for the past 3 hours and a half it still didn't finish the scan of m 80 gig hardrive. (400 k files or so) where it takes only 45 to 1 h for the others.

It really seems to dislike .cab and .zip/.rar files

You have any settings that speeds it up?