Avira Free or Paid - How About Neither? - Comments Page 2

Thanks Bob. Very advice is very much appreciated.

I use Avast free, Malwarebytes premium, and CCleaner. I have CCleaner set to scan every night (the machine is never turned off) followed by a Malwarebytes scan. I have Avast scan periodically. Works for me.

I recently purchased a Dell computer that came with a paid version of McAfee.I immediately got an email that said I had three viruses and unless I clicked on their fix button, disaster would ensue. I closed down and ran McAfee which revealed no viruses (no surprise). I never had his happen with Malwarebytes. Can anyone tell me if I can install Malwarebytes safely with McAfee? Do they play well together?
Thanks!

I am currently using CCleaner and Malwarebytes Premium for some years now. I was using Avast free, but it really got to where it hogged resources and slowed down my already old and slow PC. I switched to Windows thing. So far, so good. I was gratified to see others using my combos. Thanx for posting, guys.

I had tried many free antivirus softwares.
In the end I rather prefer using Window 10 build-in window
defender and using the window 10 disk cleaner. job done!
No more messing with my new desktop computer.

Thanks for your advice. Only last night I used this trial version. I used the "System speed up' 10 (Ten) times in 15 minutes and even on the final test it was still saying that I had 49 junk files and 47 fragmented files.
I gave up and immediately ran CCleaner. That said there was 2.2mb to be cleaned, 752 tracking files and 33.3mb of junk.
After posting this to you I will TRY to delete Avira.
Thanks again.

I have stuck with my free set of stuff:-
Avira
Malwarebytes
IObit AntiMalware
Spybot
Advanced System Care
Wise disk cleaner
Wise registry cleaner
and I backup just in case

Article couldn't have come at a better time. I could not run Avira full scan because of getting a "memory could not be referenced" error. So I uninstalled Avira and re-installed their new security suite. What a disaster!
Their software placed tentacles throughout my system. Amazon kept telling me my password was wrong thanks to Avira's password manager. And on top of it all: the scan still didn't work.

I used a top uninstaller program to get rid of the mess. It took me about 45 minutes, which included over 1000 registry entries from Avira, which tried to prevent the uninstall but Revo persisted. Even so there were seven entries left. In their "why did you leave" survey, I told them they acted just like the malware they claimed to prevent and took over my PC.

For those of you who wish to uninstall this monster, be sure to use one of the high powered uninstaller offerings available. And even afterward, do a search for anything remaining and manually delete any Avira entries. Sorry for the length of this comment but I hope my experience can help others plagued by this bloated program.

These comments I find very interesting as there are none from anyone that has used AVIRA successfully. I use it today on several computers at home and have used it for a number of years with never an infection on any of the computers nor any problems with AVIRA itself. I am very happy with it.

My Bitdefender free antivirus on Win10 laptop stopped working and reinstallation didn't work, so I switched to Avira Free Antivirus. I'm satisfied with it. It uses the Avira Browser Safety Chrome browser extension, but I use Chrome anyways so it's ok.

I would prefer using just Windows 10 Defender but I read many articles (including yours Bob) that advise against it, so I installed Avira.

If it stops working, I hope I won't have problems uninstalling it, and will try Bitdefender again. I'll keep in mind the post I read on using Revo Uninstaller.

Thank you for posting your findings, Bob. I had a similar experience with Avira regarding the uninstall. I am still receiving unwanted email on my registered address, in spite of unsubscribing & tagging them in my spam filter. TOTALLY invasive.

I used one of Avira's 'paid for' programs for about two years, until they wanted about £90 to continue. I cancelled it (with difficulty) and used W10 to uninstall it. That was in October 2019, and now, 1st November 20019, I find Windows Defender saying it can't Save, or Save As any files. It would appear that critical files are missing.

A query to the OpenOffice help site gave a solution for their suite, but I'm now stuck not even being able to save a Paint file. Do you have any suggestions please?