Virus Protection...Free Or Paid?

The great debate is back on. What will work for you? A yearly subscription fee to companies like Bit Defender or Kaspersky or one of the free basic virus protection programs like AVG or Avast?

I was always a big fan of the free basic virus protection. I had used Avast before but switched to the AVG free (version 7) a few years back, and used it until they made the upgrade to version 8 requiring you to pay a yearly subscription. I had thought this would become the end of the "free" versions of virus protection.

I purchased a yearly licence from Bit Defender for $29.99 (which include licenses for 3 computers) and used it for the full year. It seemed to work very well. On its first scan it found 3 viruses. I couldn't understand how this was possible as I had been using AVG free up until this point. It removed the viruses and I was a happy camper again. Until........I got a laptop with Windows Vista as the operating system. Bit Defender installed successfully and worked great for a month or two. Then, it decided it didn't want to check for new virus definitions. Upon reading through forum after forum, I found out that there was no real support for this issue...they pinned it on a bit defender/vista compatibility issue. Bit Defender said they were working on it, but no fix for it ever came. I uninstalled the program, then reinstalled it. It worked great again for another week or two then quit working just like before. Then, the un expectable happened...or maybe I should have seen it coming!

Upon starting the laptop one day, everything froze. Rebooted the machine. Everything froze again. Great. Thankfully I had all my files backed up, so I tried going into safe mode to uninstall bit defender. Everything froze. Great. I had to reformat the hard drive and start over again. And I can tell you I did not reinstall Bit Defender.

After doing some more online research, I found by this time that AVG had released a version 9 and a FREE edition again! Downloaded it and have used it ever since, with no problems. No freezing, plus it updates regularly.

Programs like Kaspersky and Norton and McAfee have been around a long time. Kasperksy remains one of the best paid virus protection programs on the market, but is steep at $59.00 a year. Why pay though when you can get virus protection for free? The free version covers your machine from the most common, bigger viruses. The paid versions of course do that, but also do a more thorough check of archived files, registry files, etc. So, yes it is true. You definitely get what you pay for.

Even though I had a bad experience with a paid program's software and yearly subscription, it would certainly not deter me from buying a different companies software in the future. In my mind, Kaspersky is the way to go, but in the mean time, I am quite content with AVG free looking after my machine until I save up some more pennies :)