Following my, ongoing and copious, research and testing I currently strongly recommend organisations use one of Kaspersky’s excellent Open Space Security offerings.
But what about your home laptop / workstation? Well, here again I recommend Kaspersky’s PURE 2.0 offering if you have the money to spare, but if you don’t, and let’s face it money is particularly tight these days, then you can do far worse than using a free antivirus product to protect your home computer.
There are the usual myriad options here, so I’m just going to make this simple and recommend a couple of strong options directly;
For the average user ANY of these options are actually acceptable, and whilst MSE has traditionally been dismissed it is now at a point where this would be foolish. It is now a strong product which unsurprisingly integrates and works best with Microsoft / Windows applications. In fact the only reasons it’s not top are its poor “real-time” protection and the irregularity of it’s self-updating, otherwise it is a winner on most fronts. Particularly worth a mention are its superbly low system performance impact and ridiculously good ease of use, it is also the only application which does not try and force another product or a paid for service / option down your throat.
Anyway, whilst there are other options, I’d recommend you stick to choosing from the four above, and most likely to Avast, for 2012 at least, unless you really struggle with the complexities of antivirus software in which case go for MSE.