Hopefully, now that I've explained/elaborated on my comments, you will be able to view them in the constructive context that they were intended. Marc: I apologize for my misunderstanding. And I concur that spreading the word about f/p's is indeed useful, especially in the 'guilty' party's forum, but even in other forums as well. You could use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware with real-time protection but it will replace Windows Defender. I fully realize that any security program, be it free or paid, can be guilty of an occasional f/p. Windows Defender is full anti-malware solution, but to be sure, you might use Malwarebytes scanner and not real-time protection. that I deemed it prudent to report the allegation to their forum rather than avast's. that I thought he/she was saying that MBAM was spreading an infection. My (mis-)understanding was stated explicitly, as I wrote 'I find it hard to believe that. that he/she was asserting that the MBAM update itself contained (and was spreading) malware. that the original poster was reporting a false positive.įrom his/her wording that 'Avast canot find it and it keeps comming back', I inferred. You have to download the file yourself first, but you then don't run it until you've checked it with virustotal to make sure it is clean.It was unclear.

Whatever your OS the virustotal website is also a useful resource, lets you upload and scan files.

Also untick 'performance' and 'speed enhancement' tools, don't allow a 'registry cleaner' to be installed Almost all of them bundle junkware (harmless but irritating) toolbars and browser extensions thesedays, but most of them don't install the tolbars if you go through the full options during install and untick the toolbars. Even on linux though keeping your browser up to date is very important, and further securing it with NoScript (firefox only but a really good security tool) to stop drive-by download exploits is extremely useful.Īs for what is a GOOD free antivirus for windows today I don't know, which is best varies pretty rapidly and I've been away from windows a long time. I quit Windows, went to linux and haven't needed an antivirus since. To get real-time scanning, PC optimization tools, and a VPN with no limitations. After a while with avast I had problems from microsoft themselves, unrelated to my antivirus, of them pushing the GWX.exe 'upgrade to win 10' malware to me. However, TotalAV Free doesn’t come with real-time protection and it doesn’t include any extra features. On windows I also used malwarebytes as a free scanner, no realtime protection but good for second opinion file and system scans. One warning is NEVER use any 'performance' tools your antivirus ships with, especially not registry cleaners, those can make a real mess of your system.

I used to use AVG but they got too heavy with adverts.

Malewarebytes free come with firewall