Recommendations would be great – have used AVG for a few years but the latest version (8.0) is slowing my PC up horrendously.

Any other good free ones that don’t take up loads of CPU?

Many thanks

Avast

+1 for avast

Avast and Avira. Use both and they seem as good as AVG did before it went bananas on my Vista PC….

Avira installed on GF’s machine with Win XP. Runs a treat.

Avast seems good to me too.

If you think the free ones are bad for hogging the CPU try running some of the commercial ones, especially McAffee/Norton.

Have used both Avast(currently) and Avira. I’ve got no idea how they compare technically. But on a simple day to day user basis, I’d give Avast the upper hand. Avira didn’t appear to slow my computer down when it was updating it’s database, which was good, but I got annoyed with the ads to upgrade to the pro package, which kept popping up. Avast slows my computer down when it updates (only for a minute or two), but there are no ads popping up. I won’t bore you with the reasons I changed over, but it had nothing to do with being unhappy with Avira, you’ll be ok with either.

Avast.

I’m sort of glad to hear that AVG was slowing someone elses products up.

I ended up hitting my laptop in frustration the other week and its now dead! 😳

Oh well it was 7 years old and getting very flaky, my new shiny laptop is ace though, woohoo.

I’m using Macafee which came with the computer and I “may” end up buying a copy at the end of trial.

thanks all – will give Avast a blast

An interesting table…

[pre]
|– Percent Slower –|
Boot CPU Disk
Norton Internet Security 2006 46% 20% 2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7% 20% 2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007 45% 8% 1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 2% 0% 1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS 16% 0% 992%
Norton Antivirus 2002 11% 8% 658%
Windows Live OneCare 11% 8% 512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper 6% 8% 369%
Nod32 v2.5 7% 8% 177%
avast! 4.7 Home 4% 8% 115%
Windows Defender 5% 8% 54%
Panda Antivirus 2007 20% 4% 15%
AVG 7.1 Free 15% 0% 19%
[/pre]

From CodingHorror.com: Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software

That is interesting as last time used AVG it really drained my system but that was around 4 years ago.

Ah now I see the AVG free has less protection so would explain that.

AVG 8

Drac: as CheesybeanZ points out, AVG is now on version 8 so that table may be a little out of date. But the biggest message is PePPPeR – don’t stick with McAfee!

Yeah see that Graham but it’s the lack of live protection that suggests why it would have lower resource usage.