I recently changed ISP (when I moved). My previous ISP offered free norton, which is ok and I don't mind having it installed. It never caused a performance issue on my PC and it's nice having peace of mind.

The new ISP offers mcafee but you have to download the ISP monitoring software along with it.

I ordered an SSD for Windows and games, and I don't want a bunch of shit software bogging it down. Mcafee has bad reviews online and i'd just rather not.

What do you guys use? If anything at all?

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Microsoft Security Essentials.

No seriously, use it. There is no other answer. It's the best free one by far. You never even notice your computer has it unless it actually detects a virus. It doesnt bog your system down, it doesnt constantly pop up bugging you because a website has a cookie, or to update it, or to pay them money, and it's got one of the best detection rates to boot.

You ask this question anywhere else on the Internet today and you'll get the same answer, it's extremely well liked. Microsoft themselves don't actually really advertise it because they don't want anti-trust lawsuits thrown at them by Symantec & friends, but in an ideal world they'd just bundle it in Windows.

Stay far far away from AVG/Norton/Mcafee/etc.

Thank you very much Ket! That's exactly the answer I was looking for. I appreciate it I will use that instead.

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I consider Norton Anti-Virus to be a virus itself.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

I use AVG set to the highest settings, but only on my laptop (PC has nothing on it since it's for gaming only and I use my laptop to scan files before I send them over to my PC). It's worked pretty well so far. I haven't given Microsoft Security Essentials a shot since AVG hasn't caused any issues for me, but from what I've seen from reviews and benchmarks it lives up to what Ket says.

I put MSE on and have no problems whatsoever. Have only gotten infections from stuff I download to play with though, so I assume I'm not downloading random crap, but i also haven't had anything hijack my system either.

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[In Yarr we trust.]

Avast is another good free AV, I use both MSE and Avast on different machines, would recommend both.

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I installed MSE. I really only use this PC for gaming, so I should be fine.

On another note, holy shit SSD is so much faster lol. Windows loads before it even finishes the animation. Not sure why I went this long without one.

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yeah, I've had two SSDs in a raid0 config for a while now and I've gotten way too used to things loading pretty much instantly, so much so that my laptop actually feels slow with a single SSD

only issue that I've had is that I have to secure erase my SSDs every once in a while (i.e. very rarely since I don't install/uninstall a lot of stuff) to get optimal performance back since they're the older Intel ones which doesn't have support for trim functionality in RAID or even as a single drive. At least my laptop's SSD got a firmware update that added trim later on so I don't have to constantly wipe it.

I started to install Windows on my SSD then gave up because I don't feel like reinstalling all my drivers and other miscellaneous things that I won't think of until I need them. I put Battlefield and Diablo on it for now, not sure if I should put FFXIV on it because of how big it is and how long that would take.

I'm not putting Windows on it because I don't shut down my computer. Just run check disk when I'm not home or asleep.

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[In Yarr we trust.]