As far as I have tested, AVG turns out to be the best. Avast is also good but it might corrupt bluetooth in windows 8 . It may work for you good. A level 4 hacker has told me about avast that it had caught a virus that no other antivirus could. This is why such topics remind me of avast.
why it may corrupt bluetooth?
In my opinion ESET NOD32 is the best, I've used it for years and never had any problems regarding security.
Its not security that matters but privacy, and in some cases it's the same.
Instead of giving your credit card info and bank password so some thief in a 3rld world country ,now you give it to spies from your gov.
I was just thinking the same the other day but if you're on a windows machine then you have no choice but to rely on one of these antiviruses otherwise it'll get infected pretty quickly and there aren't much choices with open source antiviruses. I know one that is ClamAV but I don't think it will work as good as the other ones does.
And it's hard to only run a linux system as some of the apps don't work on it too great.
Actually you dont need an antivirus, you only need an anti spyware & firewall (that doesnt necessarly eliminate trojans but blocks them from transmitting data back to the hacker) & perhaps a realtime kernel analyzer, that detects suspicious activity in your windows system (a trojan horse trying to infiltrate in your system)
What spyware & firewall you recommend then? And what kernel analyzer can one use to detect suspicious activity?