honestly man windows defender which comes free with windows is pretty solid. Failing that just reformat your pc if you want a fresh clean
Windows defender is pretty good. Reformatting will probably clean most malware, but some of the more advanced viruses can persist.
I think one of the more common ways right now involves the virus marking a sector of an SSD as dead, and that won't get wiped.
Really, just don't open sketchy sites/emails and that'll prevent like 99% of attacks.