When shopping for a antivirus program it can be confusing. So many of them look the same and they say they offer basically the same thing that you either take the salesperson recommendation or you use renew the one that came with computer. So just because your computer came with Norton or McAfee does that mean they are the best? Companies like Dell, HP, Acer all come with a trial version of some antivirus so they must have done research to see who really is the best. Yeah think again, they are paid to put the trial anti virus on your computer. Ever notice when you bey a off the shelf computer that there is tons of crap programs on it (bloatware as some call it)? That is how they offset the cost of the PC so that we can get it at a lower rate. Anitvirus programs pay to have their trial version put on there in hopes that you just renew it. If your like me the first thing you do with you get a new PC is to pull off (un-install) all the crapware.

Well the folks at MaximumPC ran a test on all of the antivirus out there, atleast what they consider the more "popular" ones. I was glad to see that once again my favorite one came out on top (ESET aka NOD32). Its funny you would think that the big names like Norton and McAfee would be number one but they aren't, however they are still great antivirus programs. So here are their findings:

They also has some graphics