Free Antivirus

I've been using EZ Antivirus from CA for a while and my license expired. Result? -lots of annoying dialog boxes.

Tip 1

Rather than renew I switched to the more easy-to-use and free-for-non-commerical-use program AVG (free.grisoft.com). Unlike EZ, AVG does the noble thing and adds itself to Windows "Add/Remove Programs" so you can uninstall it easily later if you wish (EZ Antivirus requires you to run the program unvet32.exe but it does a decent job removing registry entries, services etc). Word of warning - AVG's exe is 47 MB and may take you a while to download.

Tip 2

I  had to disable the LinkScanner which is a cool feature but was slowing down my web browsing I also had to disable 404 redirection in the browser.

Tip 3

If you have a scheduled scan there it doesn't ask you e.g. if you want to scan now or delay or reschedule the scan by 1 hour. This is a pain since it can be hard to interrupt a scan in progress. To deal with this, ensure the scan is set to take place at a time which will cause minimum disruption to you e.g. 2am.

There is also Avast! now which gives away anti-rootkit (a paid option with AVG).