Comparison of free antivirus for Windows XP, Vista and 7

Classic protection and all proactive!
The good news to come out of this comparison dedicated to free antivirus solutions is that every one of the programs that we detected had standard virus analysis which called on signature files. Pretty much all of them also had the important real time protection which monitors the reading and writing of files while stopping viruses, malicious files and spyware on the fly.

32 and 64 bit compatibility up to standard?
All programs are compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7. All are also x64 compatible (64 bit versions of these operating systems) except My Free Antivirus which we recommend only using on 32 bit operating systems due to the number of system lock ups witnessed. Microsoft Security Essentials stands out from the others by offering their own site dedicated to the x64 version in addition to the standard x86 one.

Antivirus ranking
To determine which is the best free antivirus program, we have taken into account each programs compatibility with recent Operating Systems, the test results from ICSA Labs, Virus Bulletin (VB100) and West Coast Labs who regularly release security rankings for antivirus systems (current viruses, worms, backdoors, Trojan Horses, malware, spyware). We have also looked at the ease of use of these products and the additional modules provided (Web shield, POP and SMTP protocols analysis …), the amount of memory required and finally how fast the scan was.

The final ranking of the programs, in order, is as follows:

• 1 .Avira AntiVir Personal FREE Antivirus
• 2. Microsoft Security Essentials
• 3. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
• 4. Avast! antivirus Free Home Edition
• 5. PC Tools AntiVirus Free Version
• 6. My Free antivirus

 
Hopefully everyone can now surf in complete security!