Advice Request Which AV was the first one you installed ?

Share practical recommendations that address the author's needs.
The first one i installed was AVAST ( free version )
This one was ok, just an AV without any additional options. At that time there was no malware, just viruses, PUP and Junk.

Then i went to :

Trend Micro Maximum Security
Eset Internet security
F-Secure SAFE
GDATA Total security
Bitdefender Total Security
Norton Deluxe ( Current one )

Never used Windows Defender.
 
If I remember correctly. it was Avast, Emsisoft then Defender. I tend to stick with what I like for a long time. This is over 20 years give or take. I think I ran Panda for a bit but don't remember for how long. Tried many over the years but within a day or two they were toast. Can't see running anything other than Defender now with some type of supplementary program such as VS or SWH.
 
The first PC antivirus that I used was the DOS version McAfee. I can't remember the first Windows antivirus I used. But, around 1994 at the college I was studying at, I tried various Windows antiviruses including Avast that were on a shareware CD. At that point in time I was still using an Amiga at home.
 
roger_m said:
The first PC antivirus that I used was the DOS version McAfee. I can't remember the first Windows antivirus I used. But, around 1994 at the college I was studying at, I tried various Windows antiviruses including Avast that were on a shareware CD. At that point in time I was still using an Amiga at home.
Click to expand...
I had Amiga 500 / Commodore C16/C64, those good old days :-)
 
F-Secure 2002 which was supplied with the PC for 1 month, then Avira.

My mother started with Avast, then Norton in 2004 or she had to be refunded .... Then it was Bitdefender then Avira
(now it has evolved, she has F-Secure Safe)
 
A very interesting issue.

My first AV program that I had was the original MKS-VIR program distributed on floppy disks by the late Mark Sell.

At that time it was one of the first antivirus programs in Europe.

Then a newer computer - AVAST version 4.8 (as I remember). I used it for a long time.

Then it was time for NOD32 version 2.x. After that I had AVIRA Free for a long time (at that time you could often get Pro version for Free - nowadays it's not so possible).

The rest I don't mention because there were too many of them (Kaspersky, F-Secure, G Data etc)
 
Norton as it was one of the "big" anti virus brands. Little did I know. I guess I was lucky, until the day a fine little mail entered my e mail. "Snow white and the seven dwarfs"!
Norton ignored it, and the payload of the worm infected my machine. That was the straw that broke the camels back. Enter Kaspersky. I noticed, that when I downloadet mp3 files with Limeware, I kept getting trojans. Kaspersky stopped that completely, and I kept it until I stumpled over PrevX. I used that until it became Webroot.
Today my 2 go to brands, is ESET and Kaspersky.
 
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This brought back some memories.
For me it was McAfee. The computer shop guys installed it on our system. Back then I knew nothing about computers and their security but somehow computer viruses caught my attention. We didn't have internet at our home. As a developing nation, we were super late to the home broadband party. Some of us used internet modem using mobile sim but it was slow and expensive.
My elder brother used to go to the Cyber Cafe and I always used to remind him to download offline McAfee updates so that we can update McAfee on our PC.
A couple of years later I became a massive AVG fan. It was my favorite. Then used Norton and in both cases, we had to download offline updates from Cyber Cafe.
Then one day my brother brought a boxed version of Kaspersky AV at home from his trip to Dhaka. I really loved it.
A couple of years later the head of the Kaspersky distributor in our country gifted me Kaspersky IS license, a week later the head of Bitdefender's marketing team in our country gifted me Bitdefender IS license, lol. After that went back and forth between these products. I used ESET a lot since I realized that AV products have a certain impact on system performance. Bitdefender and Kaspersky were causing some slowdowns. No AV felt lighter than ESET on my previous entry-level laptop.
I'm not sure why but I was always an Avast hater. When Avast bought AVG in 2016 I was super mad. I'm not a hater anymore.
I never used Windows/Microsoft Defender till I joined this forum. Encouraged by Andy Ful's Configure Defender, I started using it and nowadays use it more than any other product. Excluding some less important performance impacts, it's the most problem-free AV for me followed by ESET.
 
First AV I had ever used on my PC was VirusBuster in 2009, I didn't knew about even basic PC things like copying/moving/creating/deleting file at that point. I didn't knew about filesystem/networking or what the hell is a GPU. Well long story short I didn't had internet at that time, so no virus definition updates for VirusBuster and in 2-3 years my PC was full of worms, trojans and what not thanks to USB drives infections and I didn't even knew I was infected. Basically VirusBuster was getting busted by malware so hard I couldn't even open it :ROFLMAO:.
I created a thread on forums.malwarebytes.com because I couldn't install/uninstall KIS from my system (had no clue about infection). And Maurice Naggar from MB forum helped me in removing infection from my PC (In the end I clean installed Windows just to be sure). Here is the link to that thread from MB forum from 2012.

This Post from Maurice Naggar is what made me curious about PC/online security and safe practices that I take for granted now.

PC specs: Glorious single core AMD Athlon Processor LE-1640 with a single stick of 2 GB DDR2 RAM & Asus M2A-MX motherboard integrated ATI Radeon graphics on Windows XP OS
 
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