Alwil's Avast 4 Home Edition: Avast likewise passed both the VB100 and ICSA tests, and it offers memory-resident scanning. But Avast surpasses AVG by scanning both Outlook and standard Internet (POP3/SMTP) mail, making it a good choice if you use a non-Microsoft mail client. Amazingly, Alwil also offers support via e-mail for its free product.*

McAfee AVERT Stinger

Stinger is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection.

AVG Anti-Virus Free and ewido anti-spyware Free is for private, non-commercial, single home computer use only.

GRISOFT, the maker of award-winning AVG Anti-Virus, announced the release of ewido anti-spyware 4.0 to expand its antivirus and firewall offering to include comprehensive malware protection against rapidly growing threats such as spyware, adware, dialers, keyloggers, trojans and worms.

H+BEDV Datentechnik's AntiVir Personal Edition: This utility doesn't appear in Virus Bulletin's June 2003 tests; it did, however, pass ICSA's June 2003 tests. AntiVir includes a memory-resident scanner, but it lacks e-mail scanning (it watches only file read and write operations and looks for suspicious macros). You can use AntiVir's separate scheduler program to launch scheduled hard-disk scans, and virus-signature and program updates; but how to perform these tasks (or whether they're possible) is far from obvious.*

Softwin's BitDefender Free Edition Version 7: BitDefender Free Edition does not appear in the VB100 and ICSA test results, but the Standard Edition passes both tests using the same scanning engine as the free version. Like the other free AV tools, BitDefender employs a memory-resident scanner and is set to download updates automatically. But like AntiVir Personal Edition, it doesn't scan e-mail for viruses during send and receive operations.*

Antivirus Software with Mary Landesman

Hoaxes and Myths

Virus Encyclopedia