Free Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Rootkit

Skip the history part if you just want the free stuff :-)

History
My McAfee subscription just expired and I did not feel like renewing it. Latest version was reasonable, but customer service had me doing stupid things for 10 days to get it to work. It still slowed down my system though.

I tried Norton (now owned by Symantec) a few years back, and that also made my system generally slow.

Before that (DOS to win95) I had F-Secure and that worked perfect. Unfortunately F-Secure gets evil when I use advanced memory management functions during application development and can slow down my system with more than a factor 10. No, this can not be configured to stop, since that, according to their support, would constitute a security risk. Adding exceptions to the scan only adds them for the scheduled and manual scans, not the real-time protecting. Very nice customer service though.

Only really good experience so far is Sophos, but they are targeting business and enterprises now. Too bad, I would be happy to pay. Had a free license through the university while I studied, and I never felt I had it running on my old machine. It never failed to stop a virus.

Free tools
Well, you came to read about free tools for protecting your computer. I asked around to hear what my friends and colleagues where using. One told me to try the free versions of AVG from GriSoft. I had never heard about them, but I checked them out on their homepage and wikipedia.

It took me a while to find the free versions, but the address is pretty simple once you do. I have had it for a week now, and it seems to be running without interfering with my system. I can't say how good it is at stopping viruses, but they get good reviews and awards.

The only issue is that the update is not hidden, but pops up with a lot of useless information while you work . It is OK for me, but for the average home user, it must be confusing. All the other tools mentioned does it without user interaction. I haven't found a way to configure it to stop doing it, but again - it's free.