Absolutely correct, Gwenio1. As to the 'listening' part, they say it's only to backgraound noises like TV and ads, but as far as I'm concerned that is illegal wiretapping, and the Justice Dep't. should be doing something about it.

Absolutely.
 

Yeah, I figured AVG was considered bad these days.  A friend of mine has shockingly poor common sense when it comes to the Internet, and AVG completely fails to stop his computer from getting cancer every 2-3 months.  Though in fairness with the amount of careless torrenting he does I'm surprised his system hasn't burst into flames yet, AV or not.

Norton should be rated 'bloated trash'.  My company used if before I started, and all I can say is that it slows system to a halt during scanning while failing to actually clean or often even detect anything.  The company switched to Trend (which is in FAIL tier on that list, lol), which while much less of a resource hog it still sucks ass at actually doing the whole 'anti-virus/malware' thing.  On one infected computer Trend reported 6 problems, 0 of which it was able to fix, while Malwarebytes found 18 and fixed 18.  Ugh.

Best free ones are Common Sense 2.0, Avira, and MSE.  Malwarebytes is the grand king of fixing existing issues IMO.  I've heard Kaspersky is the top paid AV, though paying for home AV when perfectly capable free ones exist is lol.  And as Sinperium said, no AV suite is 100% fullproof protection.  Nothing will save you if you're still running Common Sense 0.9 beta.

Funny. I have been running AVG for years. Never got a virus.

'careless torrenting' will get you every time....

"Hi.  I am a virus from County Cork.  Please send me to all your friends and then reformat your 'C' drive.

Thankyou."

Like I said, I don't think any AV suite matters if someone is careless; which my friend certainty is.  I had no AV suite on my system for years and never got a virus.  If you avoid using IE and don't click/download stupid things you should generally be okay.

Of all the computers I have had to delouse because of what has been termed malware (the viruses that are downloaded from a browser and pretend to be AV), I have yet to find a single common product to blame.  I think every AV product failed in that regard.

I am going to make that statement into a rubber stamp and start stamping the foreheads of those like your friend who call me to delouse their computers!

Here's another set of tests that I came across........

http://www.av-test.org/certifications

Avast flags my DX gadgets and widgets as malware and deletes them. A huge minus in my book. As Jafo once said, this is probably as result of heuristic scanning.

I am hanging tight with MSE, ATM.

Kaspersky might be a good addition to that Jim, or MSS or Antmalware Bytes.

Don't you mean "Malewarebytes"?

You will get hammered now.

That's the old mantra from the days when malware was a novelty and common sense and occasional manual intervention were all it took to instantly fix things.  It ain't that world no more.

It's a safer mantra for people with set habits who visit predictably the same established sityes and nothing else on a regular basis.  My work entails software trisals, patches and the like as well as research which requires occasionally visiting places I can't vet as safe or sure in advance.

With the sort of malware about now, "I've never had a problem" is simply responded to with, "Not that you know.".

I didn't run Av softwaqre for two years after viruses and the like a hit public awareness and I was finding rootkits two years before they were ever publicly discussed.  I run AV software and lots of it regularly because I do more with my comp than download mail from m y website..

Malewarebytes? Do you mean Malwarebytes?  lol  

Doc, I do use MSE real time scanning, MalwareBytes for on demand scanning, and Spybot S&D and sometimes HiJack This.

MSS, is that the thing from the other thread, the one you reinstall every ten days?

No, it's the one that renews its definitions signatures every 10 days if you choose to run it.