The complimentary 90 day trial of McAfee that came with my Dell 700m expires today. They just sent me an e-mail reminding me of that fact and encouraging me to purchase a subscription.
I don’t want to be the idiot riding in a car with no brakes not wearing my seatbelt, but I also don’t like feeling that I’m be held hostage either by my anti-virus software either.
I’ve been fairly happy with the McAfee software – it hasn’t caught any viruses, but it hasn’t gotten in the way much either. Of course, I don’t use Outlook and I mostly do development and browser compatibliity testing on it, not many high-risk activities.
I guess I’ll pony up and buy a subscription, it just gnaws at me that I have to pay a 
Windows Tax 
Alex,
I have been using AVG Anti-virus for awhile and it great. It is pretty flexible and is free. You can use the personal solution and not have to worry about subscriptions. I really like it.
I have also heard good things about Avast, but admittedly I haven’t used it myself. It is also free for personal use.
There are several AV products available with a free one year trial. I’m using CA’s EZ AntiVirus (and their EZ Firewall product, too). My trial ends in December, so I’ll have to pick a new option after that.
It might be worthwhile to look at ClamWin Free Antivirus, which is open source.
I’ll agree with Bill on AVG. Works quite fine, can’t beat the price 🙂
AVG is great for me. My parents have an installation of McAffee Internet Security on their computers, but the subscription service is very… silly. When its about to run out, they uninstall it, and reinstall it, and they’ve got another year’s of subscription. Of course, I don’t condone such an activity… *cough cough*. 😛
I have also just run out my trial subscription of McAfee on our new Dell computers. I’ve since moved to the AVG personal solution, and avoided the “Windows Tax”.
The AVG Free Edition has this listed at the top of the page:
I guess I don’t qualify.
Additionally, their license has this restriction:
None of you guys are running this on a computer on a home network? 🙂
Avast has a similar limitation; their software is only free:
You might want to give NOD32 (nod32.com) a look. It consistently receives the 100% award from the Virus Bulletin and it will cost you the same $39, as McAfee, for the first year when you renew it’s only $27. I’ve been using it for just over a year and it’s been trouble free (I haven’t seen anything other than actual virus warnings) — and it’s memory usage is much lower than a lot of products.
Use Nod32. It’s lightweight and powerfull.
Another good one is Panda Antivirus – I’ve been using them for quite sometime.
Panda was previously recommended in such a way that I’ve wanted to avoid their products. 🙂
http://f-prot.com/ $30
works well and doesn’t take over Outlook like Mcafee
Nice for others I guess, of course I mentioned that I don’t use Outlook in this post.
Hey Alex,
If you haven’t paid for your subscription renewal yet, I’ve heard a lot of good things about Kaspersky.
Also, here’s a guide to the best antivirus programs.
hey, alex. are you going to purchase “Tiger” when it comes out? cuz, clearly, there’s no such thing as a Mac OS tax… 😉
Windows OS releases cost money too – you’ve just forgotten because you’re still waiting for a new release to spend money on! 😉
I have been using the eTrust suit for free through Road Runner for more then a year now (I think anyways).
Just go and grab it when it expires.
I don’t know about the other places that give it away for free, but RR keeps the version for download at the current version so you will never be stuck a version (or more) behind.
[…] *Sigh* McAfee charged me my windows tax today. […]
AVG is good. I use it and it works fine. Too bad about the non-commercial aspect though.
[…] Why we used it in the first place? Well, first it was very cheap (you get what you pay for). The Small Business Edition allows you to install the software on up to 5 clients OR servers for $200 if I recall correctly. This means that you can protect 2 workstations, 2 notebooks and a workgroup/file server with it, for example. All other vendors I looked at had different licenses for clients and servers back then and server licenses started at around $300-$500/year. Since the last virus I saw live was Parity.B in DOS 10 years ago, I just refuse to pay a $700 Windows tax each year. But since we need to have an antivirus solution to protect our customers and our data, just in case, we just bought Symantec Antivirus. The other reason we bought Symantec’s solution was because we didn’t really have the time to look at the different options in detail. We worked on SmartInspect 1.0 and had a million other things in mind. […]
Try System Mechanic Pro. It comes with Kaspersky Antivirus which is excellent. SysMech also has a built-in spyware cleaner called Spython.
http://www.iolo.com
It also has registry cleaner and lots of other useful tools.
I’ve been using System Mechanic Pro for almost two years and i’ve never had any problems with viruses. Its well worth the price. Try the trial before you buy.
I know it sounds like an advertisement. I’m not affiliated with this company or anything. I’m just extremely satisfied with this software.