Antivirus Appliance , Are There Any Free Ones ?

Here’s a question we hear quite a bit: Are there any free antivirus appliances out there?

The short answer is: Yes.

The longer answer is: Yes, tons of them. Too many to count!

Another question we get is: How many of them are any good?

And to that, we say… well… some of them are great, the rest… well, you get what you pay for.

We won’t list any of the “Be sure to avoid” free antivirus downloads, simply because we don’t want to make any enemies out in the Wild Wild Web, but we’ll go ahead and recommend a few of the better free antivirus appliances out there based on a few qualifications: Ease of use, effectiveness, and frequency of updates.

So, in no particular order…

Avast Home Edition

If you visit their site, Avast is really pushing their professional level products, which all start with a sixty day trial before you need to register, but, you can get the home edition for zero dollars and zero cents without having to pay anything in the future.

Avast is one of the more popular free antivirus applications out there because, for one, it is very, very easy to use. Even if you’ve never scanned for viruses before, the interface is pretty self explanatory. Second, it has a wide, constantly updating database of known viruses. And third, it really is effective. If you give Avast a try, go ahead and try one of the other programs listed here and see if it missed anything.

Avira AntiVir

Avira’s main lure for users is that it is updated at least once a day. This means that, as soon as a virus is discovered anywhere in the world, it’s usually added right into the Avira database. As we figure out more efficient ways to kill them, viruses are getting smarter and smarter at working around our security measures, so daily updates is a pretty good idea.

AVGFree

While AVGFree doesn’t have quite as many features as the two programs listed above, it is, nonetheless, an effective program at killing viruses, and it may be the easiest to use of all three. If you just want a simple, no frills virus scanner, AVGFree isn’t a bad choice.

These three are amongst the most popular, most effective, most easy to use free antivirus appliances. You could pick one at random and be happy with your choice, or if you like, you could try all three and settle on the one that works best for you.

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