The best free antivirus is that Avast in my point of view that is the free best antivirus till now and I was using this avast free edition since version 5 and the avast is the major antivirus programme and using since 3 years, I personally experienced a good performance of the security programme.
They provide 1 year license as well which is free of cost and provides upgrades and updates for a year. It scan engine, virus database is awesome and user interface is very nice where one can easily understand the programme and use it thoroughly.
Eset also provides a god antivirus programme, but I didn't find that much performance when compared to Avast antivirus and so many antivirus programmes are available on the Internet. AVG is also one of them and provides free license for lifetime when I was using it a 4 years ago and problem with this is, If a infected file found in compressed file i.e. zip or rar file, this antivirus programme deletes all the data means the complete rar or compressed file will be deleted and so other important files in it will be lost.
That was the time I was searching for a good antivirus and I found Avast.
Symantec Norton is awesome which I used a Trial version for 30 days. If wanna buy I would by the Norton Internet Security or Norton 360.
Better buy full version of antivirus programmes for a better protection