Anti Virus comparison site

Found this site earlier via one of the game forums I keep an eye on :

AV Comparatives

Interesting to see how the various antivirus work out against each other and you can only really do that with (hopefully!) unbiased sites like this one. It's how I first got aware of Kaspersky antivirus, which scored very highly for Overclockers.com.

I won't repeat what's in any of the reports on the AV Comparatives site but they are well worth a look. What they will do is throw a heap of suspicious files at the various AV products and see how many they detect. It may alarm you to see how badly your selected AV product will do against the malware threats that are out there.

What's my own experience with AV ? I have experience with several :

The Good :

Kaspersky - spots viruses in emails, not had a problem with it. Continuing to buy it.
Avira - "interesting", been using this on my laptops, although it's been replaced by Kaspersky on the new laptop. Not clear on its detection ability but didn't become of malware getting through. Free option available but watch out here, I suspect the higher resource loading with Kaspersky is due to Avira's free option not looking for as much as Kaspersky looks for.

The Bad :

Sophos - was responsible for virus protection at work, yet it allowed a virus brought in on a floppy to neutralise a network of several thousand PCs for almost a week. That's not acceptable.
McAfee - similar story, different infection route.
(you have to wonder here though if management decisions made the above two infections worse than they needed to be)

The Ugly :

AVG - for a free product, it's a rip off. Offers no significant protection and I had several viruses go active after slipping through its non-existent detection.

So personally, I'd go for Avira if you don't want to spend any money on your AV protection or Kaspersky if you don't mind spending £20-£30 (depending on offers!) on peace of mind for a year.

Please do have a peek at AV Comparative, they have far more scientifically derived results than mine above !