Best Antivirus? I have money, screw free.....

Since the Norton has decided to screw up on me in the main machine and not accept updates, it's time to do something different.

Kinda looking for a package that I can do all of of my drives especially when I get these servers up and running.

But for the moment, it's three, running different programs. PC runs Norton, Laptop runs PCillin, and the dumpster queen I named Frankenputer runs McAffe that probably hasn't been updated in years.
Looking at Sophos, anybody use 'em? More buisness based but what the hell, if it works good. I need something server friendly too.

What do you guys use, and are you pleased with it?

http://www.kaspersky.com/

I'm running the free version of AVG. No complaints.

I use avg free as well. It's worked better than any pay antivirus I've ever installed on a computer. It also leaves a smaller footprint so you'll have more resources for your other important apps.

Of course, if it'll make you feel better, they have a pay version as well.

everything ramen said about avg.

avast is free too and very good.

norton sucks donkeyballs.

if you really must pay for something, pc-cillin is good.

I've used 'em all. And yes, I've got my polycarbonate riot shield up even as I type this, but...

Windows Live OneCare. Let the pelting commence.

I was going to positive rep and leave it at that, but my rep machine ain't working for some reason...

Anyway Ramen's right as far as I'm concerned AVG has done the job for me and anyone to whom I"ve recommended it. A friend of mine just started running Avast and is satisfied with it as well.

Usually you get what you pay for, but in this case, free works for me!

I have AVG on my computer. It runs an update a day and it's free.

I have no idea if it's good for anything other than a personal computer and I don't care to find out.

But I have it.

As has been said already, AVG Free is fantastic and free. However, if you want to pay for a service, I highly recommend Kaspersky, as Zodiac linked.

-J.

I have not had an anti virus program on my computer for close to 4 years.

It's like fucking the internet - bareback.

If it's a judgement between the internets and the girlie in your av, Scorp... AVG up, cowboy.

God, you must be lucky, if you've never had even one crash yet.

My first computer had none and it crashed after little more than two years of use (When I finally got the harddrive transferred to the new computer, I found no fewer than 52 trojan viruses on the drive. I bet some of those had been there long before it crashed! )

How on earth are you getting away with that?

I was lax about antivirus programs when I had dialup and the only thing I ever got was the Happy99 virus. Since I moved up to 5 meg DSL over a year ago, there are times when I get hammered if not for Norton. It even stopped an ErrorSafe redirect in the BSG forum at TBBS a couple of weeks ago.

I don't know. If you stay away from porn, shady web sites and shady e-mails, you can pretty much get away without having a virus scanner.

At this point I'm more interested in how to easily get rid of brower-hijacking adware that was downloaded before the antivirus and firewall were installed and configured correctly. Without reformatting my fucking hard drive again.

Well, whatever you pick, don't pick Trend Micro. Tried their demo on one of the computers at the cafe, and the thing wouldn't fucking uninstall afterward. Seriously. Run the uninstaller, after awhile it just disappears and their demo is still there and still working.

Pretty goddamn shady to put out a demo that you either then have to buy and use or go without antivirus protection.

Ok, I'll tell ya how to do it.

Basically, I got really annoyed by anti-virus programs. You use them to protect against viruses, but most of the time, they slow down your computer like you already have a virus!

So anyways, I switched to Firefox, and since then, I haven't had any spyware overrun my computer. There was this one time one of my Sunday School kids were over, and this little shit went onto one of those game websites in IE and clicked yes to a bunch of installs. Fortunately for me (and him) it was one of those ones that were relatively easy to uninstall.

And if you guys don't have a router already, I suggest y'all get one. It acts as a physical firewall, and makes your connection invisible to outside intruders.

Besides that, just be paranoid about everything you put on your computer. Friends send you pictures? Make sure they are gifs or jpgs, and have Yahoo Mail scan them first, and if at all possible, view them only in Firefox.

If you download torrents, use torrentbox, where if there is a virus, people will comment on it and tell you.

The alternatives to that, as I've said many a time, are IE 7 and for mail, Windows Live Mail desktop. Not as hip, but just as effective -- basically, the only way to get infected with either Scorp's combo or mine is to really, really work at getting your rig infected. Of course, on my own system I back that up with Windows Live OneCare + Defender.

Webmail... reduce your chance of catching viruses by 99%.

I don't understand why any home user uses a pop3 mail client these days... they are inferior in just about every way I can imagine. If you have to use a specific pop3 address for work or school contacts, most webmail services can retrieve pop3 and send from that address for you.

Gmail is great, so is Yahoo, and so is Windows Live Mail (WLM seems a bit slower than the others though, but it has great security features).

Personally I'm sticking to gmail since I used my yahoo address as my "sign up for shit online" address so its nothing but spam. The new yahoo interface is very similar to outlook 2003 though if you are used to that type of thing (and so is WLM).

I like WLMd primarily because, for me, opening a web browser brings on the temptation to waste time here instead of getting work done. Of course, WLMd has those tasty, tasty RSS feeds...

Aw, shit, here I am again... :borgs:

Thanks for the input guys, it's appreciated.
I went ahead and set up the freebie AVG on the Frankenputer, and seems to be doing it's job just fine. Well, that was before I had pull it out of the network to scavenge the networking card out of it for this unit after the card for this one refused to even be recognized as being there all of a sudden.

So much for NetGear goods, it's less than a year old.

I'm pretty careful about what I open and avoid those multi fwd emails like the plague. Smutwise, there's only one site I go to and slam shut any redirects asap.
I'm looking to upgrade this unit to XP (or perhaps Vista) in the not too distant future since ME is now offically hacker's fair game by default being abandoned by MS for further updates. It's just as well, any of the new stuff like WLOC won't work on machines running less.

I've seen less than a dozen flags for virus infections since 2001 and fortunately have been able to dump them relatively easily. One semi crash which left the printer non existant. I had to reformat for that one because after looking for a fix for two months I finally gave in. That was a serious nine hour pain in the ass and I ended up losing some stuff to boot.

Never had the balls to go bareback, I have too much stuff on here I want to keep. :chicken:

Every Netgear product I've used, since they were called BayNetworks Netgear has been golden (10 or 12 years now). I had one problem with a USB Wireless device, but other than that, they have been incredibly reliable. I'm sure they've made a piece here and there, that wasn't up to snuff, but most of their products are great quality and inexpensive.



Oh and I still use POP3 and not web mail. While I'm at work or out of the house, I can check my mail through the web mail server, but I leave it on the server and download it to my home PC. I just find it faster and easier to sort through everything. I've never had a problem with getting a virus through e-mail. I can't say it's that much better than web mail, I just prefer it.

The Frankenputer's IE has been branded and is the biggest pain in the ass to remove. I worked on finding it in the registry to get rid of it but failed to find what I was looking for in it to get the job done. Matters not on that one I suppose, I'll likely just reformat it.
I have some crap on this one in the search arena from PeoplePC I can't get rid of. I hate those fuckers even worse now than I did before. I was reluctant to use them but EV1 sold out to them and I didn't get the DSL in time before having to use it. Bad decision. Bad.

Oh it's probably something I did, or something on this thing didn't play well with it. I'll stick the card in Frankie and see if it works there. Seems to have gone out when I was trying to set up the XBox and PS2 into the network.

I use POP3 and just have it sent to the house. I have accounts I use for the crapola so my main accounts stay clear for quite a while before someone inevedably manages to find it and spam me to death.
I learned early on about not giving addresses out flippedly, that's where some of those aforementioned infections came from. I learned about attachments the hard way and got one that was a bit of a pain to get rid of. The rest were aquired smutsurfing in the sewers. I haven't had a flag in a couple of years now.

[action=Wayno]knocks on underside of desk. [/action]

Yea, the laptop came with it, and thusfar has been little problem, but it is still running on it. I'll see how tough it is to get out soon enough when I make the changeover.

I'm almost ready to check out IE7, but iIrc, it won't work on anything under XP.
Fifty bucks a year isn't bad for WLOC, and is usable on up to three units. I hope I can uninstall the existing antiviruses cleanly enough to not have any issues with it. It has a 90 day trial I think I'll jump on for the laptop today to check it out.

Wish me luck, I'm going in!
[action=Wayno]readjusts hat and ducks head against the wind....[/action]

I'm not exactly an expert on anti-virus programs, but I have looked into the question a fair amount. Two things have become clear:

1) Paid anti-virus programs are more powerful than free ones. In particular, the free ones do not do much at all with spyware (though that can be compensated by also running Ad-Aware and SpyBot regularly) or checking incoming and outgoing e-mails. (They only check files as they are opened.)

2) Of the "big three" free anti-virus programs, most reviews are in agreement: The best is AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, followed by AVAST 4 Home Edition, followed by AVG Free Edition.

Sorry for you AVG fans, but though AVG is considered to be a good anti-virus program, it is not the best, not even among the free ones. The one area in which is comes out with top marks is in the amount of space it takes on your hard disk. But in terms of running programs in live memory, the information I have says it installs four running processes while AntiVir installs only three (and Avast installs six).

While all three are proven effective at "in the wild" virus detection, AVG has a significantly higher rate of false positives in detecting zoo viruses, and a significantly lower success rate than the other two. Avast is the best at detecting zoo viruses, but with a rate of false positives almost as high as AVG. AntiVir is almost as good at detecting zoo viruses as Avast, and with a very low rate of false positives. (Of course, one can always wonder to what extent zoo viruses are a good prediction of the viruses that will actually show up in the wild, so that might not mean as much as it sounds like.)

So my suggestion is either to go with a really good paid anti-virus program (Kaspersky, NOD32, BitDefender and McAffee all get good marks; which one is best seems to depend on who you ask--but avoid Norton like the plague), or to go with AntiVir, backed up by regular usage of Ad-Aware.

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