Was unaware of this and sure gave ma pause, but what I'm now reading is supposedly someone taking a quote out of context and misrepresenting it or something. Are You referring to this interview?

The logo makes me not want to use Avira. I don't want my laptop to grow tentacles and attack me if I don't upgrade to the premium version after 7 days.

Uh no, I've always used AVG and it's still not displaying any ads.

Surely now it has become a bit worse than before with its Win8 appearance (and half of the tiles are demos for the pro version), but it's still doing its work without annoyances and allows many settings.

I doubt it's a powerful antivirus, but its basic free protection is perfect for a careful user.

P.s: I use it with the old Zonealarm + Firefox with noscript + old Spybot

Not specifically that one, no, although I have read it as well. There were a couple others, but I don't recall exactly where I saw them now. But as I noted, I still use it. Really, there's not a whole lot better protection than common sense and being careful. Couple safe practices with the protection you do get from MSE (as well as MBAM) and I've had no issues for several years of using it.

Personally I'd like to have my computer chase me through the streets while growling STARS!!!

You just brought back the memory of NEMESIS traumatizing me during Resident Evil 3. First time I saw Nemesis, I ran into a room, closing the door behind me. I thought I was 100% safe because in previous RE games, only you can open doors. Guess what happened next. :)

Yes, that was a seriously disturbing moment when they changed the rules on us like that. That caused me quite the round of panic as well. :D

Sure, just wanted to catch up, and was wondering if there were other statements I didn't find or something. I've had a good run with MSE myself, but if they'd down right advise not using it themselves, I'd have to reconsider I think.

Apparently PcPro was where the story originated, and for what it's worth Microsoft issued a droning statement about their commitment in response, and some folks also got to the source for clarification.
It could be just back-pedalling, but the wording in that original article does seem off, since some paraphrased, not directly quoted sentences make it seem like the Microsoft rep was advising actually using another real-time "antivirus" on top of MSE, not instead, which is obviously off. So it might be just a case of overblown misinterpretation this time (or at least they cared enough to back-pedal ;).

Linux :).
And for windows I use the MSE. But imho the best protection is the user itself. Don't click on popup adverts, don't enter shady sites. Never run software from untrusted sources etc. Then you should be fine.

I used MSE + common sense (I visit a very small number of sites, most of them for biz) and got bit last week - couldn't open any docs, PDFs, etc. Kinda hard to work when I can't create shipping docs, invoices, etc. lol

Booted into Safe Mode and did a scan on MSE (I had previously run a scan just a couple days before). Found nothing. Ran MBAM, found 12 hits. Ran the ESET free online scanner, found 3 more hits - I love this scanner, fwiw. Cleaned all that crap and it still wasn't working right. After checking online for advice on similar symptoms I downloaded and ran ComboFix (couldn't turn off MSE like it advised but ran it anyway) and it found a boatload of stuff and cleaned it all up. It's now running properly.

Gonna switch over to... dunno yet. The new AVG is doing the job (AVG a couple years back was horrible) on a couple other PCs but I may give Avast or Avira a shot on my machine.

I've never heard of this Common Sense. Do you have to pay for it? Judging from what I read on a lot of forums, a lot of people don't have it, and many don't want to use it.

[/irony]

It's a lifetime subscription, but you do have to keep it updated. :P

I got bit by a nasty virus as well that MSE failed to pick up on through my work PC. It wasn't just ransomware - it also grabbed a lot of my passwords (probably through keylogging) and various accounts of mine were hacked. Worse still, I had the FTP account details of a client stolen from my PC and the perpetrator tried to hack into that as well.

The client was understanding of the situation, but virus protection really is no joke when it comes to work PCs. If your virus protection fails, you can end up with seriously nasty problems.

I tend to like immunet protect to go along with whatever else I'm using. It's designed to work along with supported antivirus programs and be very quick about finding and spreading virus definitions.

Glad your client worked with you. It's tough to earn back a customer after trust is lost.