At home, I run Windows XP x64, and I’ve had a tough time finding an antivirus program that will work on this operating system. I waited a year for McAfee or Symantec to come out with a version for this OS, but as of yet, neither of them had one that I could find on their unuser-friendly websites.

After searching around, I found Avast, which is free for non-commercial home use. I installed it and ran a full scan, and it found a couple of dormant virus files. It has a real-time scanner, which hasn’t noticably affected the speed of my system (something I can’t say for either McAffee or Symantec).

What are your thoughts of Avast and antivirus software in general? I haven’t been too thrilled with McAfee, as their update process has always been a bit unstable and problematic, and all of their products except for VirusScan has been a joke. Symantec has been pretty good to me, up until I got an OS that they don’t seem to support.

At any rate, until Windows can design a user-rights system that’s as good as Linux, we’re stuck with Antivirus software, and Avast is the only thing I’ve found to work on the 64 bit version of XP. It’s free, which is nice, but only time will tell if it actually prevents virus infections.