what are the best options and where can I find them?

for paid protection I prefer Eset products

Eset is a solid choice. I used it for a few years, but don't use any antivirus now a days

What operating system?

If windows, believe it or not Windows Defender is absolutely amazing… there are very few vulnerabilities that can get past it and is often times patched quickly.

If GooBuntu, we have several choices along with Mac,

-Krawk

Windows 11

Use Windows Defender and don’t download anything you’re unsure about. You'll be good, Windows has one of the best built in anti viruses.

-Krawk

Thank you!!!

it's a great signature-based detection engine, but outside of that it only has performance (this is tied to its effectiveness) and price going for it. committing to backups and just using defender is fine (especially if the price of a paid AV isn't nothing to you), but I don't think it's right to say defender has absolutely amazing protection. Eset is much more robust than defender, but it's like insurance.. you may never run into a situation where it would have mattered. testing things with a list of known vulnerabilities is not a very deep scratch test, it's certainly important but it's not the technically challenging part of the equation and is a dead race at this point.

Spybot search & destroy.

I agree with this, Eset is for sure, much much more better than Windows defender, but if the user’s machine is infected, he should just be reimagine anyway, I guess it just depends on what OP is doing on his machine.

To OP, if cost is not a factor, get ESET, if cost is a factor and you’re not doing anything sketch on your machine then just go with Windows defender.

-Krawk