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It will increase scan times, but rootkits are particularly nasty in how they dig their hooks deep in the OS, so it's better to err on the side of safety. One setting we highly recommend enabling is to search for rootkits before scanning. Whether you want to duck your head into the software's menus and start fiddling with knobs and dials is up to you, but if you do decide to tweak Avira's behavior, you'll find a modest tool chest of options.
#Best antivirus for pc 2016 free#
We chose Avira as our free option because of the level of customization available. In terms of pricing, Webroot is currently at $19.99 for a single device for one year (ignore the countdown, it's always that price). There are well over 100 of them, and you can export your settings to make setup on another PC quick and easy. And, though it's lightweight and short on local storage requirements, SecureAnywhere is surprisingly high on adjustable settings. In the ubiquitous broadband era, that's not going to be a problem for many people, particularly gamers. Since it's cloud-based, SecureAnywhere works best when there's an Internet connection. SecureAnywhere also politely stays in the background, so you're not bothered by updates or added lag when playing games. It differs from the regular version in that it offers a system optimizer tool to "analyze your devices and the operating systems to detect system issues, wipe away all traces of online activity, and make deleted files unrecoverable." In practice, we only saw it delete temporary files to free up some disk space. Webroot also makes a special version of SecureAnywhere for gamers. Task Manager shows SecureAnywhere using around 50MB of RAM and less than 15 percent CPU utilization during an active scan, yet it takes just a couple of minutes to scan 150GB of data spread across two SSDs. It takes up just a few megabytes of disk space and uses about 5MB of RAM when idle. SecureAnywhere was and still is a remarkable outlier in AV.
#Best antivirus for pc 2016 portable#
McAfee Gamer Security does it all for you.īest portable storage drives | Best SSDs for gaming | Best graphics cardīest DDR4 RAM | Best CPU for gaming | Best gaming motherboards It's great for someone who wants to know they are protected from all the usual bad actors online but don't want to tinker around with any settings.
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It makes gaming a priority for system resources, mutes notifications, and anything else that would interrupt your fun.
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McAfee Gamer Security knows when you're in a game, and it will stop anything running in the background as you play. It streamlines the process so you can rest easy, knowing that you can still play Apex Legends without having your performance bogged down with security-related pop-up notifications. Fast-forward to today, and McAfee has made an antivirus specifically for gaming. Chances are, if you bought a PC in the early 2000s, it came pre-loaded with McAfee antivirus software. McAfee has always been a big name in the antivirus world. None are hugely expensive, and there are even some free options if you're looking to save some dollar. We've checked all the major antivirus programs out there, and put together this compendium outlining those we'd recommend for keeping your gaming PC protected. With our PCs holding so much of our personal information these days, that's another reason to make sure you're protected too. With dodgy pop-up ads, process injections, phishing emails, and malware waiting to pounce under the guise of all kinds of trustworthy-looking sites, it pays to double up on your system protection. Importantly, as cyberattacks are evolving at an alarming rate and can be irreversibly devastating if handled incorrectly.
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Antiviruses are much less of a system resources hog compared to yesteryear as well, at least the best antiviruses we've tested and listed here are. Basically, unless something disastrous is happening, they'll keep shtum. Most of today's top antivirus suites avoid breaking your concentration in game, often offering some kind of gaming mode.
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