Free AV System for Corporate Use

I know this has been hashed and re-hashed but here is my situation. I work for a school system, that DOES have Norton Corporate on the servers. But seems to balk at the idea of paying for licenses for all the desktop machines so that Norton can actually protect the machines before they infect the server. This I can understand due to there being roughly 5- 10k machines, and that would a huge .... investment. But lately we have been experiencing a great increase in virus activity, notably Welchia. My thought was to find a GOOD completely FREE AV system to install on the desktops that will auto-update without any user(meaning regular users, not admins) intervention and give the users a feeling of protection. The only free systems I know of are Panda and AVG. The question I have of those is, since there are free and paid versions, how have the free version been crippled and what is not available. Is the only difference between the free and paid version is that you get tech support? Any help will be greatly appreciated.


Phaeton (previously Phaetos but I seem to have lost my password and can't retrieve that information while at work ;-)

Other than no tech support, the AVG free edition is version 6 instead of the current version 7..but it does autoupdate and probably would give a ton more protection than you have now...I am not aware of any Panda free version..other than the free online scan, but that isn't a continual thing..you have to manually do it each time.

Just to take you completely off tack ... but errr umm, shouldn't something other than a local anti-virus product be stopping stuff getting introduced in the first place to your network ?, strikes me if you are looking at a free AV client as your 'answer' you ain't really seeing this from the right angle...

As far as AVG goes, the paid version has a newer engine & the pattern updates are released (supposedly) daily, with the paid version there is also 'guaranteed' to be sufficient server power their end to provide you with updates, wheras with the 'free' version theres only one server & if its busy when you want updates then you just have to wait... btw its not designed for a networked environment (whatever that means!) for that they 'recommend' the paid version, well they would - wouldn't they ?

I'm not too sure how your licensing is working here, if you have server products for AV they 'usually' include client licenses too, but without knowing the why's & wherefore's I can't comment ... just confus-ed ! :D

Its rather a strange attitude for those in charge to take after all they lock individual classrooms as well as the main gate to stop entry so this is just an extension of the same security measures.
If anything you are even more prone to viral and trojan attack due to students uploading any old junk from floppy,CD and USB media to the local PCs and given the seemingly prevalent threat of infection these days perhaps a case could be brought forth for local anti-virus installations and judiciously increased firewall protection.

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Originally Posted by Archer

Its rather a strange attitude for those in charge to take after all they lock individual classrooms as well as the main gate to stop entry so this is just an extension of the same security measures.
If anything you are even more prone to viral and trojan attack due to students uploading any old junk from floppy,CD and USB media to the local PCs and given the seemingly prevalent threat of infection these days perhaps a case could be brought forth for local anti-virus installations and judiciously increased firewall protection.

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Exactly my point guys. Why do it at server level, but not at the desktop level where kids bring floppies from home to use, etc.? Though I did find out while I was getting the ok to do this, that they are "in negotiations" with NAV for the licensing for the client-side. So this will be a temporary fix till that gets in place, probably after christmas.


Phaeton