DSF

I had free McAfee with my laptop which has now expired, just wondering what people on here use before I renew.

Built in Windows Defender, it's free and 100% compatible with the operating system.

Thanks Gary is that a firewall aswell

Yes it is, if you have Windows 8 or above, it's already on your system, just keep it up to date. Also download Malwarebytes. It might be worth buying the premium version to stop ransomware attacks. If you plan to download suspect files, use an online scanner before opening the zip file.

https://virusscan.jotti.org/

First thing I ever used to do with folks PC/Laptops...remove McAfee or Norton! lol. Resource hoggers.

I've always used Avast but this last year they've gone down the hard sell route and added in all sorts of crap you don't need. Shame really as it was always very good. I still have installed but I tend to favour AVG now.

Malwarebytes, Superantispyware and CCCleaner are the only other progs I use now and then.

Same here Justin. In fact, NO anti-virus software company has ever had a penny from me. AVG and ZoneAlarm have always done the job. The most important thing is always to keep multiple, reliable backups for when the doo-doo hits the fan, which it always does at the worst possible moment.

Thanks alot folks.

Another saving of £50.00 and all for £10.00 membership well worth it this place is amazing.

Definitely MULTIPLE backups - we had a ransomware attack, and the 3 backup NAS drives were online at the time, so it got to all of them - fortunately, it affected files in order of last used, so we were able to piece together all our files from each of the drives - i think in the end we lost very little - maybe one day's worth of photography, but it did take time to get everything collated again. Since then the drives aren't mapped to the computers, and we have offsite cloud backups running every night.

I would also recommend using gmail as your main email client. Perhaps forward all your website email accounts to a central gmail account. Not many viruses will get through Google's anti virus might.