Antivirus software is unfortunately just one of those things that you need in today's world. But I hate most antivirus programs out there. They are so invasive and resource intensive that in some ways they are as bad as the viruses they are protecting against. They noticeably slow down your system and they noticeably slow down your network I/O as it scans packets. They even do things they don't advertise - did you know Norton Antivirus is a firewall? We found this out the hard way while testing WinINSTALL; communications were blocked yet the Windows firewall was disabled.
There are a number of free antivirus programs out there; some are good and some aren't. Here's my take on them.
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Avast - Avast is probably the largest and best known free antivirus. Whereas the program does a great job scanning for viruses, it is resource intensive. And probably the worst problem is the UI. Easily one of the worst UIs I've ever seen. I'm scanning my system for viruses not using a car CD player (yes, if you haven't seen the program they designed it to look exactly like a car CD player).
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AVG - I'll admit I've never run AVG so I can't say much about it. I've read reviews that said it was decent, but not as good as Avast.
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Microsoft Security Essentials - Microsoft shocked everyone late last year when they release MSE. Even more shock at the fact that MSE was a great program. My first exposure to MSE was a review of the top 5 free antivirus programs. MSE was in beta at the time, it scored higher than all other programs except in scanning speed. But the final version is faster than the beta. Anyway, MSE is a great program. This is now the free antivirus program I recommend to everyone. It has a very clean UI. The program is not too invasive. My favorite part is the program can easily be set to either continuously monitor or only scan when I say to scan. I use the latter because I don't like programs running all the time that slow my system down. Give MSE a try, it's a great program.
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McAfee - McAfee has a free command-line virus scanner that is fast and simple. There is no installation, just unzip and run. There is no program running all the time scanning your system, it only runs when you actively initiate a scan. It's just a super-lightweight antivirus program that's great to have. The program is updated almost daily. To download use FTP and visit ftp.mcafee.com/pub/antivirus/datfiles/4.x/. The filename is sdat####.exe (the number changes daily as it's updated). After you download it run "sdat####.exe /e" to extract the files. After extraction the command "scan /adl /all /unzip" runs a full scan of your system, all files including compressed files.
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Spybot Search and Destroy - Whereas Spybot S&D is not a virus scanner, it does compliment a virus scanner very nicely. It scans your system for other "problems" like spyware, adware, and malware. Spybot S&D is very clean, simple, and fast.
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RootkitRevealer - The last tool is RootkitRevealer by SysInternals (Microsoft). Really really nasty viruses embed themselves into your system as a rootkit. This basically means that all standard methods of detecting the file even exists will fail. There is no way to even see the file let alone remove it with a virus scanner. But RootkitRevealer does reveal these files, so it's good to run this from time to time.
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Me personally I use Microsoft Security Essentials and McAfee for virus scans. I occasionally run SpyBot and RootkitRevealer to round out the mix.
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