Free Antivirus/Malware software?

AVG Free, including these others

Try running rkill before running MWB or AVG.

I agree with @erichw1504 ; I’ve been using AVG free edition for years now, and not only does it work really well, but it’s very subtle when you need it to be.

Definitely supporting AVG.

Microsoft Security Essentials is good and unobtrusive

I have not had any luck with free antivirus software. The only one that has really worked for me is PC TOOLS. that is a wonderful piece of software.

AVG is pretty ineffective actually.

Try Avira whch competes pretty well against even the best paid antivirus software.

Here are the results from AV Comparatives Main Tests

Total detection rates:
1. G DATA – 99.9%
2. Trustport, AVIRA – 99.8%
3. McAfee – 99.4%
4. Avast, Bitdefender – 99.3%
5. F-Secure, eScan, Panda – 99.2%
6. Symantec (Norton) – 98.7%
7. ESET – 98.6%
8. AVG, Kaspersky – 98.3% (sorry, guys)
9. PC Tools – 98.1% (sorry, @Tenpinmaster)
10. Microsoft – 97.6% (sorry, @meiosis)
11. Sophos – 96.8%
12. Norman, K7 – 96.6%
13. Trend Micro – 90.3%
14. Kingsoft – 80.1%

Reading on in that report and adding in other factors like false positives and scan speed placed Microsoft, AVG, Kaspersky, and McAfee in the second tier while Avast! and Avira are top-tier. Other tests I have seen elsewhere have similar results, and many agree with (or rather, made me decide on) Avira.

@jerv According to your link, that comparison used Avira Premium, which isn’t free.

I’ll still check it out though, thanks for the recommendation

Malware bytes is the best free malware scanner.

@meiosis True; only the AV part is free, but its the same program that’s included in the suite. Personally, I back it up with Spybot S&D to catch the non-viral stuff.

Also use Ad Aware, to get rid of all that sticky adware crap.

Some malware seeks out the .exe files for common AV and prevents detection. What I’ve done successfully is to uninstall malwarebytes, reinstall in “safe mode” and change the mbam.exe file name, then run MWB from the renamed file instead of the shortcut.
Running rkill before malwarebytes has cleaned up every time.
change the file name back when the bug is gone

@Blueroses That’s genius!

AVG Free. you can download it at tucows .

Fixing a Virus infected PC is not an easy task.

However if you fixed it, then again there will have lot of issues due to the changes done by the virus to windows system.

The ideal solution is reinstall the OS again and install a reliable virus guard before to another virus attack.