Best Anti virus either free or pay.

can't comment on "the Best". But With W11 I've just stuck with Defender. But then I've also gone with Edge as the browser.

As with bracknellboy with Win 11 I don't bother using a third party AV solution.  Defender seems to work well.

Interesting, it seems no one gives a damn about sophos premium. no patriotic support?

Like others, I rely on a combination of Widows Defender + Common Sense. 

The first one is free.  Unfortunately, the second one can come at the cost of 'learning-things-the-hard-way'. 

(It's not happened to me yet, but I'm conscious it's mostly a question of 'when' rather than 'if' - so, in some respects, the best form of defence against malware is a proper backup regime.  If you don't already have it, you might want to consider not going for a paid-for AV solution and spend the money on some cloud storage, instead.)

Back to AV, though, and AVLabs quarterly tests suggest most offerings they tested are much-of-a-muchness (just be aware that some are the 'corporate, all-bells-and-whistles-and-a-price-to-match' flavour).

Putting my serious hat on for a minute, I've always felt the threat isn't to my computer/phone/tablet/TV/etc. No, the threat is obtaining information from those devices or the usage of those devices. Yes I'd rather my hard drive on my PC wasn't reformatted against my will but the pales compared to a keylogger than captures enough information to allow a third party to log in to financial sites that I use and cost me money.

Therefore I want to know about anything on my devices that is sending data out across the internet potentially against my will. So on a PC I normally install personal firewall software that will alert me to anything that is sending data out of the ordinary. A good piece of software will know where e.g. Windows 11 processes typically connect to and not bother me. But if something starts sending data somewhere that hasn't been explicitly allowed by me, I want to know about it.