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On Saturday, we asked you which antivirus software you use on your personal desktop.
Thank you to everyone who took park in the poll. Here are the results:
As we did with the poll about XP Mode, I’ll share what I learned and what’s next.
What Did I Learn from this?
- To state the obvious, Microsoft Security Essentials is the most popular (by a long way), which is impressive considering how bad its predecessor (OneCare) was and that it’s only been available for about a year.
- Avast!, AVG, and Comodo are popular choices, which I expected; however, I expected to see more people using Symantec Norton Antivirus and McAfee Virus Scan (due to how many PCs come bundled with a full/trial version of these programs.)
- Just over 10% of you are using another program (although quite a number of those who entered the name of the other program missed the option from the list), which brings the number down to 7%.
- Very few of you use no security product (which also surprises me.)
What’s Next?
We don’t want to make you paranoid and, just by looking at these results, you are doing the right thing by using security software (if you feel you don’t need to, then you either a. don’t need to or b. probably have had no problems–yet–hence the lack of need.)
Expect to see a continued flow of security-related articles (did you see the PC Security Handbook Second Edition?) and a deeper look into some of the programs listed above.
For now, take a look at these recent articles:
- Top 5 Free Anti-malware Programs [2010 Edition]
- The Complete Guide to Protecting Your PC with Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE)
- 5 Things You Should Know About Microsoft Security Essentials
- 6 Signs Of Malware Infections
- More Signs of Malware Infections & How to Find Them [Intermediate]
About Rich
Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix them.
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Sweet, another win for MES!!!!
I meant MSE! Oops.
When you are asking “Which anti-virus software are you using”, you will most likely get answers mainly from people using such protection… hence, it should be NO SURPRISE that you got so little answers from anyone not using such software.
Good point.
Microsoft Security Essentials
You may have been surprised that few people indicated they were using Norton Anti Virus. I've used Norton anti virus and Norton security in the past but stopped using it 4 years ago. At the beginning, Norton kinda cared about its customers but overtime, they completely stopped caring about them and started selling software that made computers crash. So I'm not surprised at all that most of their customers have switched to other software. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Norton a 2.
MSE is the best free AV software! And this explained why MSE has earned the August VB100 cert! http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windowssec…
well there are a lot of reliable antivirus now..people can choose from a greate variaty. for example I just chaged to ZenOK free antivirus as is quite similar to the others I’ve used in the past, desides this one offers you the possiblity to backup and protect your data
This is an interesting poll, Rich. Security programs are known to slow down Windows PCs, which makes it difficult to choose the best one. Antivirus companies are clearly aware of this since they really stress that their products have low footprints and minimal impact on PCs. I wanted to test this out for myself so I decided to run some benchmarks to see how some of the more well-known programs affected my PC. This blog post explains the test criteria and why security programs slow down your computer in the first place: http://bit.ly/eVsWOZ. I’m planning to start posting the test results there next week so let me know what you think.