Wait, when? I use it daily and I've never seen anything like that.
About five or six years ago. It decided that a popup window with warnings about how much better the paid version is
every time it updated the definitions (which was daily, mind you) would be
a good idea. Naturally, I disagreed.
When AVG planted a permanent underhang-type banner in the control panel, that lost me some faith in it as well, but it's still usable... or was last I checked. All these AV companies are getting really ballsy lately.
Hm, perhaps the only reason avast! hasn't been mentioned yet is the lack of scheduled virus scans?
Is that still true? The only documentation I can find on that is from back with like 4.x, and the program's at 7.x now. I'd check myself, but l removed it a few weeks ago for MSE, since Avast's Heuristics scanning kept picking up on some hacking tools I'd prefer not have deleted (such as Nirsoft's password recovery things).
Microsoft Security Essentials is
literally the worst mainstream anti-virus software there is out there. It's the only one that's failed AV-TEST, and consistently, too. It's placebo-ware. Do not use it if you want to actually be safe.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Micr...ails-AV-Test-Loses-Certification-310715.shtml
There's already sites out there that review AV programs. I just don't link to them because they also do tests on which threats are caught and which ones aren't, and those are pretty misleading for various reasons.
See, that's the kind of thing I don't like linking to because
there's no actual details of the test procedure. Even their "test procedures" page is extremely vague when it comes to the actual mechanics of the test. Given that the sites also tend to toss infections of types they KNOW aren't caught by a program (non-replicating scareware for examples), and that just skews the numbers even worse. You can see the differences on their site yourself when looking at programs that only provide anti-virus functionality (MSE for example), versus programs that also use heuristics to detect non-viral programs (such as Avast).
In addition, what was detected how? Which were hash detections, which were fingerprint detections, which ones were because of the heuristics engines, what was the heuristics level set at in each program? Those are important details about the test that aren't given, with the heuristics being the most important type of detection nowadays (and also the biggest cause of false positives, but that's another discussion).
But then again, I could probably run my computer without it and be fine, I haven't had a virus since the early 2000
I haven't personally caught an infection since around 2002 or so either ("fun" little story about mine, let me tell you), but I wouldn't go with that. A lot of the personal security nowadays comes from keeping any internet-facing software updated (browser and browser plugins most often, but also media and document decoders), but your AV's there for where a hole in them IS exploited and something gets dropped into your system anyways.
Here's some articles about "good" sites like The New York Times having infections inserted into them via ads...
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/14/malvertising-hits-the-new-york-times/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/25/malvertising
And here's Mozilla's known+patched Firefox vulnerability page.
http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox.html
Firefox 17 alone fixed six holes that could allow somebody to drop an infection into your system just from viewing a web page... it's the same type of story with most popular internet-facing software, it's just Mozilla's the most open about their stuff. I could link to CVEs for others, but then I'd have to do individual searches, and I'm lazy.
