Amen! (and I'm atheist!). I haven't booted windows on any computer or laptop I've owned in the last 10 years. Paperclip in the cd tray opener hole thingy, linux CD in, even before 1st boot. :)

I recommend Avast to everyone I know. Low on resources, good at avoiding false positives, never had any trouble.

On top of that, I usually tell people to install Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. The free version is not a real-time scanner, so you manually run it every now and then, or when you think you have a problem. But it's saved my bacon multiple times. My brother's computer was basically wrecked, crippled with malware, and nothing could save it until I ran Malwarebytes.

https://www.malwarebytes.org/

We use Kaspersky quite a bit, its more of a system hog but as you pointed out seems to rank higher. The big announcements for new viruses seem to come from Symantec and Kaspersky so take that for what it is.

IT admin here. Windows Defender in the modern form (ie: Windows 8+) is basically Microsoft Security Essentials.

Arguably they used to have good scores/detection rates, but in the recent couple of years have been the worst in terms of detection rates. That said once signatures are discovered and out there, pretty much everything will detect it.

But keep in mind these results always move around and fluctuate. AVG used to be the tits, now it ships with a redundant firewall, pop ups to buy it, and can be a pain to clean. MSE was cream of the crop when it first came out, but got worse scores as time proceeded and people would code around its detection mechanisms. Norton/Symantec used to be HUGE, like #1 but is oft not reccomended even in the corporate world (for good reason, they suck now).

My point is this is an industry that is constantly changing year to year.

At work, MSE/Defender would be inadequate, and we use Trend for our corporate AV. Kaspersky is also currently rated one of the best AV out there.

But there is a trade-off in many cases, as they tend to be more obtrusive to an end user (ie: Trend has deleted/quarantined mail in outlook, stopped legit executables from running or working,caused CPU cycles to freak out, memory leaks etc and just breaking installers etc). However we have the resources and expertise to troubleshoot and mitigate a lot of that.

At home, i use MSE/windows defender and Malwarebytes Premium (like 25/year for 3 machines) and I am fine with it as a last line of defence. In fact even the Malwarebytes addition is recent (like the last couple months) and i just used MSE prior to that.

The best thing you can do is have backups and learn some basic security practices are really mostly sufficient (dont click on pop-ups and other links you dont recognize, actually read prompts and look for check boxes, know what you are installing, nothing is free, dont randomly give login creds etc). So i would never waste time trying to clean an infected system (as once its comprimised its always comprimised, i would simply be restoring from backup.

There's no such thing as "perfect security." If you want to go with Windows Defender you can, but never use any security application alone. Always run them in concert with other anti-malware programs like Malwarebytes and SpyBot.