Helen has just got a new laptop (under £200 ex display - ie nicely burnt in - at Currys!) to replace her venerable old Compaq. We have always used AVG free antivirus but have begun to find the interminable updates practically every time you switch on a bit of a pain. Hopefully this process should be completed a bit quicker on the new machine, but my question is what is the competition - principally Avast and AntiVir - like in this respect?
In my experience all the free virus checkers are worth exactly what you pay for them ;-) A couple of people I know who charge substantial amounts for disinfecting virus infested PC's like them a lot. That said I guess that they are better than nothing.
Frequent updates can save a lot of grief, most good antivirus programs will allow you to override the frequency, doing so means that you might not be any better protected than using a free program.
The Best programs such as BitDefender and Kaspersky update unobtrusively and are not intensive memory hogs like some of the other programs. The pay for versions of the programs you mention do not do very well in a recent review, see:
More information can be obtained from these links: