You’ll get as many answers here as you like. Windows Defender is excellent antivirus for consumers, provided you don’t make silly exclusions, or prevent it from talking to the cloud. Malwarebytes is also excellent antivirus for consumers.
The truth is that of the major vendors, (Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, Malwarebytes) you’re looking at maybe 2% difference in what is or isn’t detected on any given day. Most problems occur when you go looking for trouble in spite of your AV, or start tweaking the settings and inadvertently reduce your protection.
Other folks will have other, very strong, very valid opinions. I am biased. I work for Microsoft. But I also work with third party antivirus every day. When I see problems, it’s either a very new threat that hardly anyone has seen, or it’s a configuration problem on the user end. As an example, I’ve done investigations where McAfee is the AV provider. In almost all of these, we’ll find an event where ‘McAfee detected this bad thing, but is set to ‘report only’ mode.’
Avoid Avast / AVG and McAfee. The rest is up to your discretion.
You’ll get as many answers here as you like. Windows Defender is excellent antivirus for consumers, provided you don’t make silly exclusions, or prevent it from talking to the cloud. Malwarebytes is also excellent antivirus for consumers.
The truth is that of the major vendors, (Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, Malwarebytes) you’re looking at maybe 2% difference in what is or isn’t detected on any given day. Most problems occur when you go looking for trouble in spite of your AV, or start tweaking the settings and inadvertently reduce your protection.
Other folks will have other, very strong, very valid opinions. I am biased. I work for Microsoft. But I also work with third party antivirus every day. When I see problems, it’s either a very new threat that hardly anyone has seen, or it’s a configuration problem on the user end. As an example, I’ve done investigations where McAfee is the AV provider. In almost all of these, we’ll find an event where ‘McAfee detected this bad thing, but is set to ‘report only’ mode.’