My strength for recommending Avast! Is.fading somewhat.
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They used to be top-notch but now they're pushing a lot of their own software and the pop-ups have gotten more frequent over the last six months or so. I'd still recommend it for basic users as it's still fairly user friendly and, as irritating as it can get, it is effective. I've generally not seen a need for anything above the Essentials package.
The All-Inclusive package has a decent firewall but there are other firewall options and the other two aren't really that attractive enough for me to recommend paying for. I might recommend it for someone who has a business and low technical skills but even that is shaky. The Top-Notch package is overkill/gimmicky. Your average Avast! User does not need 'military grade' data erasure software and there are other (free) programs that do system-wide updates and access anywhere and they probably do it better. My beef with Avast! Is the way they're trying to take the product.
![Antivirus Antivirus](http://i.imgur.com/v9PLDJZ.jpg)
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Used to be just a good, solid AV program. It did one job and it did it well, that's it. Now they want to 'Googleize' it and make it replace other programs for basic jobs but when that happens the original functionality tends to fall by the wayside if the new additions don't cause problems of their own.
With that has come the push to market it to low-skill computer users by convincing them that they should totally pay for a 'military grade' data eraser. I'm always wary when someone's pushing a program or piece of hardware on someone else, claiming it to be 'essential', that the person doesn't need and can't tell they don't need because their own technical skills are still developing. A lot of jaded techs I've talked to tend to shrug and just go with 'caveat emptor' and that the information is out there not to get screwed over. While I agree that in theory this is true it's no excuse to deliberately give someone bad (or slanted) information for your own gain. I had saw people commenting, saying that even Microsoft didn't recommend MSE anymore.
I couldn't believe it, so I searched. In, Holly Stewart, the senior program manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, said that Microsoft Security Essentials was just a “baseline” that’s designed to “always be on the bottom” of antivirus tests. She said Microsoft sees MSE as a first layer of protection and advises Windows users to use a third-party antivirus instead. As for a free virus recommendation, before I went with MSE, I always used Avira, and might switch back.
Still, with noscript, adblock, and not randomly clicking on weblinks and e-mail attachments, and with bi-weekly or monthly scans with another antivirus (like Emsisoft Anti-Malware and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware) MSE should still be a decent choice for people with common sense. Not as good as others It secured AV-TEST certification on October 2009, having demonstrated its ability to eliminate all widely encountered malware. However, it lost the certificate on October 2012, having shown a constant decline in protection and repair scores.
In June 2013, MSE achieved the lowest possible protection score, zero. Edit: I should have read your link first. Nowhere in there do they talk about MSE. They talk about identifying threats, proactively blocking them (with patches), and sharing threat data with 3rd party A/V companies. Also, they have other antimalware products besides MSE, like Defender which is much improved for Win8.