Nod32 is what I run on my main machine at home. I like it.

Spybot and AdAware (ala lavasoft) were always the two I used toi run but they became long in the tooth and slow on updates for a while – not good when you want to deal with malware.

Ah yes – ccleaner. The tool I forget but use. It has caused me any number of head scratching sessions when I can't work out why I have no recent documents in the MRU list … then I remember I have it set to hyper agressive mode!

Reports I've heard have all been good though which, I admit, surprises me. I said to @scamtypes earlier that I have an ingrained distrust of anything that comes out of Redmond and purports to be a security product.

Nice to hear a positive response about Symantec as well. For years I've been a fan of McAfee but I realised a while back that it suits a corporate setup but becomes bloatware when on an individuals PC at home. My Church runs Nod32 which gets better and better in my opinion. Its interface was out of the dark ages, but since they improved that then there is little to fault it.

I've always been of the opinion that if you can combine spyware and AV updates with the Windows Update cycle, it's less moving parts. Granted Windows Defender hasn't ever been that great, but…

Right now, MSE is not really an option for us at church. We're using Symantec Corporate AV, which is surprisingly good compared to their consumer products (in terms of performance). We've never had any virus issues that weren't nipped in the bud.

For malware removal I really like Malwarebytes (malwarebytes.org), it seems to do a better job than the more common Spybot and AdAware. Although I still use Spybot for some of the advanced features like digging into the registry to clean up start up issues. For full registry checking/cleaning I'm a fan of ccleaner. Very small and very quick in what it does.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by stubbyd: New blog post: My Top 5 Free Security Tools. http://bit.ly/4yORQJ...