Best antivirus to use?

There are actually a few that I would recommend. But before I delve into listing the specific antivirus and protection, let me fist quickly explain how you should view antivirus.

Antivirus should, in my opinion, should be looked at in numbers and percentages...Let me explain....The holy grail of antivirus is its detection rate. The detection rate is the percentage or amount out of a hundred an antivirus detects a viruses on average...Detection rates range from a low of 40% to the highs in the 90%...There aren't many over 90%. So any that are around 85 and up are what I would go with. But none are perfect...so remember the best defense is offense...REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR DATA!

This is not an all inclusive list and there are other things to consider...like how strong is your system for the more demanding programs like Norton. Ok so enough of my mini rant...lets get to the list of antiviruses...

A simple list of detection rates, from research by av-comparatives.org February 2009

Out of a total of 1.274.928 viruses, trojans, worms and malware the following list tells us the detection rates of the different AntiVirus programs:

1. G Data 99.8%

2. Avira 99.7%

3. McAfee2 99.1

4. Symantec 98.7%

5. Avast 98.2

6. Bitdefender, eScan 98.0%

7. ESET Nod32 97.6%

8. Kaspersky, TrustPort 97.1%

9. F-Secure 93.4%

10. AVG 93&

11. Sophos 89.6%

12. Command 88.9%

13. Norman 87.8%

14. Microsoft 87.1%

15. Kingsoft 84.9%