laptop help

Nod32(ESET - Antivirus Software with Spyware and Malware Protection). It's the most updated and the pro's use it. It's constantly updated and it gives you the option of what you allow your computer to access.

Norton, McAfee and those mainstream ones are usually at the bottom of the chain and last to update when some nasty virus hits.

Most virus scanners are pretty much comparable to one another since they use the same heuristic scanning techniques. Microsoft actually has their own (free) virus scanner called Security Essentials that you can download. If you Google independent reviews of the well known virus scanners you'll see that it's pretty much neck-to-neck with what they catch.

Microsoft Security Essentials

Also worth noting is that most viruses these days are exploiting un-patched security vulnerabilities in Windows. It's not really like 10 years ago when viruses would spread via email, now a days they spread via websites that attack flaws in your web browser or operating system. Along with having a working virus scanner, you want to make sure that Windows Update is set to automatically update.

You also need to be conscious of clicking on links and naturally installing software that is pretending to be something that it's not. There is a lot of news lately about "Mac Defender" where people would visit a page and a pop-up pretending to be a virus scanner would tell the user their Mac OSX was infected and to buy this program... when in reality that program was "malware" and it spread like a virus, stole credit card numbers and created a huge mess.

Fake "MAC Defender" antivirus app scams users for money, CC numbers