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I use to recommend Kaspersky to my clients but in the last 2 years ish I've had more problems with slowdowns and logs creation filling up the HDD. I now recommend Bitdefender and have not had any issues since.

Like GoldenLag said free should be fine. make it a habbit of manually scanning every week and the odd scan when you think something is wrong.

I get what you're saying but I have to disagree. some of the features of Bitdefender are pretty sweet. I personally don't use it but installed it on my parents laptops and I can monitor them from anywhere and update/scan when I need to. Also autopilot makes sure they can't screw up anything lol

yeah for the free option windows defender is pretty decent. If you don't mind paying and need more features you should checkout bitdefender.

Bitdefender + Malwarebytes and you should be good