Which Antivirus for Windows 7?

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The list of “compatible” antivirus programs for Windows 7 is short – Norton, Kaspersky, Avira, and AVG.

I tried Kaspersky 8 Beta first, but after a couple of weeks I’ve determined that it’s just too bulky and “obtrusive” and has some issues that I’m not happy about.  Recently I uninstalled this (thankfully, the uninstall was very clean and left no traces) and tried AVG Free.

AVG free boasts some 80 million users, is MUCH more lightweight, and at this point this is the one I recommend for Windows 7. For a “free” version – this thing has way more features than you’d expect.

Since my Avast! license recently expired on my main development machine that runs Windows Vista x64, I installed AVG Free on that too. It found and eliminated nearly half a dozen known threats that Avast! never was able to find.  The only option that is disabled that I could find on AVG Free was the rootkit scan. F-Secure has a free FSBL.EXE scanner to take care of that, so the “free” antivirus option is indeed alive and well.

Furthermore, with AVG running and all of its components fully enabled, Windows 7 runs on my notebook computer in only 653MB of RAM! And that’s with SQL Server 2008 and a whole bunch of other services running. Microsoft got this one right!  Once I figured out how to get the “Send Feedback” links off all the windows and get rid of the desktop watermark in the right lower corner, it doesn’t act like a BETA to me!

Oh, and did I say “Free”?

You can get your copy of AVG free here.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Rick Strahl3:05 PM

    Anti-virus apps are for sissies ;-} Live dangerously!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sameer Bhattia11:49 AM

    You are joking. Are you saying Windows 7 uses less memory than Vista?? that would be great

    I am using a dual core lenovo with 2GB ram, sql server 2008, visual studio 2008, and my machine grinds to a halt with Vista so I had to move SQL to a different box.

    ReplyDelete

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