I see this thread has already pretty much said everything I was going to, but yeah... The best free antivirus programs are AVG, Avast, and Avira.. The best paid antivirus is NOD32.. Norton is garbage, mcaffee is garbage, bitdefender is okay but horribly slow, Fprot/FSecure are quite good, though not free, trend micro is garbage. The corporate version of norton, Symantec Endpoint Protection is surprisingly very good, though the consumer version is terrible, takes over your whole system, doesn't detect viruses, it's actually much worse than a virus.
As for spyware, Spybot S&D is good, Malwarebytes is good, Superantispyware is good, ad-aware is lousy. If you're just trying to clean out a nasty infection smitfraudfix and combofix are great, so is rootkitrevealer, gmer, and hijackthis.
As for firewalls, unless you have no router, I highly recommend against any sort of software firewall, they do very little to protect you and they're very annoying, popping up all the time, conditioning you to always click yes to everything without reading it. If you must, I hear sunbelt is good, comdo is apparently okay, zonealarm is poor.
I work at a computer store and I run at least ten virus scans each day, so I have a pretty good idea what works and what doesn't... At least 50% of the virus-ridden computers that come in here are running a full paid version of norton, and when I uninstall it everything speeds up dramatically. I've never encountered a virus that slows your computer down as much as norton. I can't even begin to describe how much I despise that program. A friend of mine is the north american distributor of bitdefender, and he keeps telling me how great it is, that it updates its definitions hourly, yet in all honesty I've never seen any virus that's been first detected with bitdefender, it seems the f-secure labs in helsinki are usually the first to identify new threats.. Bitdefender's scanning engine is incredibly slow, scanning a fresh install of windows with some 50,000 files took over 3 hours, whereas nod32 did it in 30 minutes. Microsoft has a new antivirus program in beta testing right now, and apparently it's very good, though I haven't tried it yet.
What do I use for my own computer, you may ask? A handy little app called "Common Sense 2009", which involves not running executable files from untrustworthy sources. I've been running without any antivirus for over 8 years now, I run a scan maybe once a year, and I've never had any viruses. Last time I had a computer of mine infected was around 2000 or 2001 when the blaster and sasser worms were going around.. I did have an antivirus then and it didn't help me, back in those days you'd automatically become infected just by plugging into the internet for 5 mins.
) but all in all you need something.
