5 FREE Antivirus Program For Your Personal Computer

"Urgh! What’s with my PC getting these pop-ups every time I start my computer?"  

Surely most of us have faced this situation before and it's common anywhere in the world today. One of the common laptop repair request is virus removal. Hackers with malicious intention LOVE these computers that aren't protected enough. For them, it's like sucking nectar out of flower, in your case the nectar might be your credit card information, Gmail password, Paypal password or even live feed of your webcam! 

If you don't want to be a victim of blackmailing, spam or scam, protect yourself by making sure your computer is installed with latest security updates and install with credible Antivirus program. While some of us with extra dough don't mind spending a few dollars for an antivirus program, there are a number of us which looking for a more cost effective alternatives or in most cases, FREE.

Afraid not, nowadays a lot of computer security company offers a FREE version of their antivirus/anti-malware program, with a limited function of course.

Here are 5 FREE antivirus programs that you can use for your personal computers. For smartphones antivirus program, we will have it in another blog post.

Microsoft Security Essentials

AVG is one of the pioneers of FREE antivirus program. It's popularity soars during the time when worms and malwares at large and most of the computer security companies charged for their antivirus program. It provides real-time protections and proven to be an effective common antivirus blocker and cleaner.

Microsoft has always known for charging their products but in recent years, it has changed a lot. More and more free product and tools published by the Microsoft team in an effort to provide more value towards their customer. Microsoft Security Essential is one of the examples. The product doesn't come by default when you purchased it. You need to download from their website.

In September 2013 Holly Stewart, Senior Program Manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, told Dennis Technology Labs that the product was merely "a baseline", providing only a first layer of protection. Microsoft subsequently clarified that its "anti-malware solutions provide strong, comprehensive defences against malicious code and attacks".

AVG Antivirus Free 2014

AVG is one of the pioneers of FREE antivirus program. It's popularity soars during the time when worms and malwares at large and most of the computer security companies charged for their antivirus program. It provides real-time protections and proven to be an effective common antivirus blocker and cleaner.

Avast Free Antivirus 2015

I have been using Avast a number of times during the past 10 years. For a free program, it has done a really good job detecting and cleaning up my messy infected machine. You can perform a boot-time scan and this what set it apart from other free antivirus program. A lot of modern rootkit is running in kernel-mode instead of user-mode thus making it harder to detect and cleaned. With the boot-time scan, you can get rid of these annoyances once and for all.

Panda Free Antivirus 2015

Panda antivirus is known for being the first cloud antivirus program. The new version is an evolution of it's first generation of cloud antivirus program. The uniqueness of this system is in detecting and disinfecting viruses and other threats that feed off from other users information shared in real-time through crowd-sourcing.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 2.0

While Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 2.0 is not exactly an antivirus, it is worth a mentioned here. What is great about this tool is that it clean up viruses and rootkit effectively. Tech support staffs often turn to this tool when other antiviruses fails to clean up those viruses. It’s FREE, easy to use and the new version comes with a nice interface.