TechRadar: Best free antivirus: 9 reviewed and rated
We test the best free antivirus apps for Windows
By Mike Williams
January 27th 2012
From hacked ad servers to malicious Facebook pages, the web is a dangerous place, and so it's vital that you install good antivirus software to protect you from harm.
And this doesn't have to mean paying a bulky annual subscription for the rest of your life, as there are plenty of free security tools which claim they have what it takes to keep you safe.
Do these tools really deliver on what they promise, though? To find out, we took ten popular packages and put them through a gruelling series of tests, measuring their speeds, assessing detection rates, and finding out exactly how their installation affected our test PC's performance.
And if you sometimes feel that all free antivirus tools are more or less the same, then our results will prove a real surprise.
If you're tired of antivirus packages slowing down your PC, for instance, then the good news is that some are really lightweight. But choose unwisely and you could find your boot times extended by 20 seconds, and Firefox launching up to 5 times more slowly than before.
Scan times are important, too. So you'll probably want to know which of our test packages was the slowest, and which tool completed its tests 22 times more quickly.
And if you're interested in accuracy and reliability then we've the detection rate scores you need, and some surprising reports of major reliability issues, including one package which refused to install updates, and another that proved unable to complete a single scan.
Which is the best free antivirus package, then? Read on to see just what we've uncovered.
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