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For many years I was quite happy with the free ones available until last year when I got a nasty that I didn't know about until it had done some damage! So I went with the, recommended, "Kaspersky Internet Security" at £19 for a single user. Provides everything from firewall to real-time scanning, anti-spam/phishing, anti-hijacking, anti-malware etc. Easy to set up, keeps itself automatically updated regularly and provides a report every Friday. I'm very happy with it and would recommend a look.

Well it's blotted it's copybook already.  It's currently stuck (for hours) trying to scan one file which I've since deleted and it's still stuck and won't even let me stop the scan or shut down the bloody av.  Not a good start.

TazUK, Avast (free version) was what I was using last year and for a number of years previous but it let in a nasty that stopped my PC from booting - even in safe mode? I put the question mark because the engineer had my PC on test for almost a full week after removing the virus and it performed faultlessly. As it has to this day. Was it the virus or coincidence? In the absence of any other fault we had to draw conclusions, so Avast went in favour of Kasperski.

You can't really rely on any single solution but a resident and online scan are the best most of us can do.

Other than that tools like Adblockerplus for malicious adverts and Noscript help a lot.  The best defence IMHO is a nasty suspicious nature.

Apart from one early glitch it's been good enough to warrant the purchase of a three machine pack from Amazon but I must say the trial goes into a truly annoying nag mode half way through the period.