Anti-virus - what is the best free option today?

[[AK]Nuts]

Hands down the best out there is Sophos. It's not available for home purchase though. Currently the Vatican, NSA, & GE all use it. I've got about 150 additional licenses available. I can probably set one aside for you... just send me a note. It comes with ZERO tech support for home users but it's bloat free and update-able forever. Let me know.

[Moon]

I tend to disagree on the AVG. Why? I keep it under control and have virtually no bloat. How? In services I set "watchdog" to manual which eliminates tray bloat, however I allow email scanning to run automatic which does not cause any problems or tray bloat. I do not allow it automatic updates or run times. I update and run when I feel like. I recently updated to AVG9 which seems to be the best so far but is still similar to AVG8.5. Also it has an AVG safe search addon for Firefox and it works quite nicely. In all the years I've run the various versions of AVG, I have yet to get hit. Holidays are usually the worst times and sometimes I'll find some nasties roped and hog tied in the vault.

[[AK]Bribo]

Agree with Moon. I run AVG on my kids machines with no problems.

[[AK]StitchJones]

AVG has been a great program and has worked like a dream for me up to this point.

[[AK]Squidly]

OS X

[[AK]Clay]

OS X

I sometimes wonder about that. The claim is that Apple is virus free, because it's a different OS. The counter claim is that because it has such low market share, no one bothers to write a virus for it. If that counter claim is true, that's not a comforting position. All it takes is for someone to decide he doesn't want to be a me-too virus writer, but really make a name for himself and stand out. And so target Apple.

I'm not sure how these things work though. The way virus' propagate, maybe they basically can't propagate if something has a low market share - because there's not enough "hosts bodies" out there to keep the strain alive.

[[AK]StitchJones]

With an Unix based OS you cannot drop files onto a machine and have a process that runs it cause the virus to spread and do it's damage. This is the beauty of an OS that is locked down and executes processes based on interaction from the system directly and the user that requests it. RUNDLL32 is a whore of a plague on Windows.