I’m using a nice Dell 390 Precison Workstation with an Intel Core Duo processor that a client loaned to me. I’ve set it up to boot into either 64 or 32 bit Wïndows XP Pro, or Vista Business. I didn’t want to buy antivirus software for all these installations, but I didn’t want to be without virus protection, so I looked around for free antivirus software that didn’t have the restriction that it could only be used for home or non-commercial use. I found PC Tools Antivirus. It works great on Windows XP. It works on Vista too, but it gets blocked at startup and I couldn’t figure out how to selectively stop Vista from blocking this one program. Each time I boot, I can tell Vista to let it run with a few mouse clicks, but I got tired of doing that every time I restarted Vista, so I went looking for another solution.

 My first solution was to use the 90 day free trial of Microsoft OneCare. Fortunately, after the free trial expired, and I declined to buy the software, Microsoft invited me to be a beta tester, so I have a free beta copy of OneCare running on Vista. It seems to work just fine.

Just this week, my father-in-law bought a nice little Toshiba wide screen notebook computer with Vista Home Premium on it. He needed an antivirus program, so we took a look at the free options for home use. First we looked at AVG  Anti-Virus, since a friend had highly reccommended it, but the Grisoft web site didn’t say anything about Vista compatibility, so we didn’t try it.

Next we looked at Avast. It looked like it would be just the thing- free, good reviews, and Vista compatible. So, he downloaded and installed it. It installed fine, but during the first Virus scan the screen went black and the computer became unresponsive, although there was still heavy disk activity going on. He completely powered down the computer and booted Vista again. This seemed to solve the problem and Avast seems to have been working fine for the last few days since then.

Other free options that I found while web sufing were: Avira AntiVir, Comodo AntiVirus, and WinHKI Checksum-Calculator Anti-Virus. Has anyone tried any of these, or found any other free Anti-virus programs? What do you think of them?