Right now, I am trying out different antivirus programs but out of all the freeware antivirus programs is better or more reliable then the others?

a-squared - http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/free/
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
Avast - http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1018.html
AVG - http://free.grisoft.com/
ClamWin - http://www.clamwin.com/

etrust, (one years free subscription,) is a good one

http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/

I've been using AVG free for three years, never had any problems with it and have never (touch wood) been infected by a virus since using it.

AntiVir is now known as Avira, I think.
I like ClamWin because it is free, open source and light. Unfortunately its pretty slow and have no on-access scan.
AVG and avast! is pretty popular. Avast has skin though, I dont like that.
Probably AVG is the best maybe...

Not sure...

I use AVG, quite happy with it. A-squared is not an antivirus, it's an anti-malware scanner (the free version is the scanner only), intended to be used alongside AV programs to catch types of malware they miss. I used to have it, but switched to ewido -I think it's better, but it's only for Win2k and XP. If you have Win 95, 98 or ME, use a-squared. Either is a good addition to your security array.

so between AVG and Avast....

Avast has skins which maybe some wouldn't like. are there any cons of AVG?

Avast can be installed without skin support, therefore it will look like a normally GUI'd app instead of looking like a media player - it's allot easier to use out-of-the-box so to say if the skins are disabled.

AVG doesn't have any drawbacks that I know of for a free antivirus other than becoming a bit chubby and needing a diet to get it down in size, however in my views it's currently tied with Avira AntiVir as my two favourite free antivirus'.

AVG fails to remove viruses constantly. ;P

From past experience I would go with AVG.
When I put a free AV on the machine to clean it up I would still run a scan from trendmicro or panda's sites just to make sure they catch everything(every AV misses something sometimes).

Reasons I choose AVG over the others.
1. No registration. Yeah, I know its not a big deal but I know that some people are too lazy to register it every few months and their pcs will be vulnerable.

2. I had a lot of problems with Avast not removing trojans that it found. It would say that it removed them and then I would reboot and it would alert me to them again. I then uninstalled it and put etrust on the machine. As soon as Etrust was installed its resident scanner detected and removed the trojans.

3. Antivir's automatic updates(if you want to call them that) arent up to par. I do like its scanning engine though. You can install it without installing the resident protection and have it as a back up.(think ewido free, adaware, ect)

For a backup scanner, there's also Bitdefender 8 Free Edition, which comes without the resident protection. It's a little resource-hungry, but if you've got enough RAM it's pretty good: http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en--...ee-Edition.html

I've extensively tried Antivir (now Avira) and AVG and found both of them very good. As detection rate Antivir is really the best (better than many commercial antivirus, IIRC only Kaspersky has similar capabilities).

Now I'm trying Clamwin that being Opensource has all my favours. It seems good but lacks realtime protection, feature that however is under development

I'd have to agree with you. I'm using Avast now. AVG didn't remove a virus for me and I was forced to reformatt.

Yeah, the updates in AntiVir suck. You kinda have to run the installing program everytime there is an update instead of just fetching new virus database.

ClamWin is unfortunally rather slow.
But I heard about major changes gonna come to ClamWin, then hopefully it will rock.

Not all AV's mentioned are listed.

Last testing was Feb but a new test will appear June 1.

AV comparatives

Ha, AVG does have a "drawback" or "feature" when I was looking through its application data folder I noticed it had created four files equaling about 1GB. What those bloated four files were for I don't know but I ended up removing AVG in favour of AntiVir.

was that in the C drive? cause i have a 12MB file in there right now.

I don't have them, just three files in AVG application data totalling 37k

Thats the AVG7QT DAT file, it creates that every time you run a scan. Its supposed to make scans faster IIRC but it can be safely deleted. I have it added as a custom file to remove in CCleaner and I've never noticed any difference in scanning times. Slightly clumsy programming IMO having that file created where it is though.