Hello. It's been a while, I know. Thing is, I don't spend a lot of time at the pooter these days. Anyway…

Best Beloved has decided to buy himself a modern PC. Having got fed up with the umpteen elderly laptops, a somewhat iffy tower and Parallels on his Mac, running everything from XP Pro to 7 Home Premium, he's decided to get with it and get up to date.

I know nothing about Windows 10, but that's what his new box will ship with. Some outline of what the current state of play with anti-virus software would be useful, please. For preference free software, but the most highly recommended would be handy.

Thank you for the help.

I use Avast, as does big_D IIRC (though maybe he pays for the full version). Every couple of days you get a pop-up ad, that's it. It's regularly updated and is recommended by the likes of Computer Active. It's certainly warned me about a few banner ad trojans/code injections at least.

Avoid AVG. When they're not selling your data it's missing the unwanted data heading your way... Computer Active recommend Kaspersky as a cheap paid for option. It's best in show anyway and they have an offer on their site IIRC, but definitely in their magazine. DM me if you think you'd ever need that deal, it's ongoing.

NoScript browser plug-in would be good if hubby tends to go to the same sites all the time, just whitelist those and script won't run anywhere else. And it's all easily adjustable from the page you're on anyway. That's another one me and D both use.

win10 has AV and a firewall installed. the AV is basic but it works.
i use AVG free and it works very well ...

Excellent! Thanks both.

+1 for avast. Stopped using avg when it became bloatware (after version6 iirc).

Avast's reputation was hit with a couple of black marks recently (it was caught spying on users with Adware).

I've been using the built in Windows Defender for the last 4 years (or Security Essentials as it was called on 8), that is also running on my wife's PC. I put Avira on my daughter's PC.

The Avira developers seem to be Star Wars fans, the scanning tool is called Luke Filewalker.

Thanks all!

New PC installed and running. We'll probably use Windows Defender for the time being, with the firewall on the box plus that at the router. Best Beloved doesn't do much random surfing, and doesn't really trust PCs on the interwebs, so he will probably continue to do most of his surfing with his Mac.

The box shipped with 90 days' preview of a thing called Bullbar or Bulldog or Bullsh!t or something. I must remember to disable it before they want to charge us money.

So far, Windows 10 seems quite adequate. It's still Windows, but it's a bit smoother and a bit less nagging than previous iterations.

If you are planning to stick with Windows a Defender there's no reason to stick with the trial stuff (which I assume is Bullguard). Having multiple different AV software running isn't usually a good plan.

True. Once Best Beloved has stopped playing I'll have a poke about and disable Bullguard.

I use the free edition of Avast! and don't have any issues with it.