Reply to: What antivirus do you use?

[Dark Black]

Another +1 for MSE.

Used to swear by AVG until v8 when it went bloaty and slowed the PC down to a crawl. After that started using Avast (still do on my netbook with TinyXP), was much faster than AVG but a bit annoying doing the update thing at start-up (on a slow connection).

Happy enough with MSE.

[PAH]

But maybe malicious software does not really exist and AV is all a con, like dentistry.

That is definately the case. Something to worry the muppets that have insurance up the ass.

I've just de-installed all my anti-virus bollocks and can rest easy in the knowledge that if anything truly nasty happens I can roll back to a recent VM backup, or the problem will be caught on whatever server/network I connect to that still has all this anti-virus bollox installed.

So like a whore with every disease under the sun, I can't catch anything new and it's the problem of whoever tries to **** with me.

[Sysman]

My ISP has offered me a 2 year free subscription of F-Secure (to soften the blow of a small price hike) for a single machine, so I'm wondering if it's any good.

Has anyone here got experience, favourable or otherwise of F-Secure?

[wim121]

Sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting "I've got a Mac" doesn't actually act as a deterrent.

The iPhone may well be responsible for a whole slew of Mac nasties as MacOsX gets more popular.

Yes I laughed quite hard at the option "none - I have a mac". Mac's are more common for getting infections than one would think. The problem is as well the inexperience of some of macs users. Most linux users, have a working IT knowledge and tend to be better at avoiding infections.

At the moment on my main laptop, Im using linux, so no av (as I dont mess about without protection) with xp running on a virtual machine. Several other machines such as xp, win7, w23k on the server.

On the server and XP rigs I have an old version of CA which is extremely stable and has a very small footprint and some of the best virus defs out there from CA.

[SantaClaus]

After trying all the usual memory and CPU hogging suspects, I can fully recommend Vipre.

[Sysman]

We think an AV must be good when it pops up now and then and says "We have just saved your PC from total destruction" But maybe malicious software does not really exist and AV is all a con, like dentistry.

Going back a few years, but a former colleague was convinced that the antivirus companies were writing viruses themselves to keep up demand for their products.

[xoggoth]

We think an AV must be good when it pops up now and then and says "We have just saved your PC from total destruction" But maybe malicious software does not really exist and AV is all a con, like dentistry.

[BrilloPad]

Interestingly I was just called to the house computer which I rarely go on. Avast was in a funny old state. I had to totally uninstall and reinstall.

[vetran]

bullguard is one of the popular 'PC Hurled' (to describe the fate of most of their customers purchases) add ons. Buy £30 worth of AV to remove all of the junk that comes with the PC during manufacture.

[Platypus]

AV test seems to be panning MSE now, looks like its gone off the boil.

AV-TEST - The Independent IT-Security Institute: Nov/Dec 2011

I'm amazed to see BullGuard on that list. The last machine I found with that installed, I removed it, I thought it was a trojan. After it was gone, the machine starting behaving properly.

[Sysman]

I think I've only ever twice caught anything nasty, whereas anti-virus causes no end of problems. So really it's a question of which anti-virus gets in the way and pisses you off the least. And for that I'd say MSE.

I had something weird when I was in the throes of applying all the patches to a fresh Win7 installation last year. I simply zapped it and started again.

I've kept an up to date copy of WSUS Offline around since then so that I can at least get most of the patches in with the system disconnected.

[xoggoth]

How come? MSE can also balls up development work, common advice is not to do realtime scanning on your dev-folders, same goes for search indexing

Not scanning anything, I mean adb needed for Android emulator will not work with Bullguard installed even if every single thing in it, AV, firewall etc is turned off as here:

anddev.org • View topic - Beginner: ddms: Failed to initialize monitor thread

[VectraMan]

I think I've only ever twice caught anything nasty, whereas anti-virus causes no end of problems. So really it's a question of which anti-virus gets in the way and pisses you off the least. And for that I'd say MSE.

[d000hg]

If you have real-time scanning, and there are ~1 gazillion viruses out there, is it surprising your AV requires a few 100Mb of RAM?

Did you not check your VM to see if a nasty had got past MSE, out of interest?

[PAH]

given this weeks forum nasty

Which nasty was that? I didn't get any warning emails from Admin.

Was it the one that earlier in the week redirected from Google's CUK Forum link to MyStorage (or some such tulip)?

I have MSE and it didn't detect any problem. Very re-assuring.

So I deleted the VM (that I use solely for internet browsing) and copied over the backup I took when I created the VM.



They use Kasperski at work and on my work PC I often notice the ram being hogged by its AVP process, to the tune of 300mb.

Wouldn't be so bad if I had a recent/decent machine but as a contractor I'm stuck on a 4 year old PC with only 2gb ram (despite it supporting 4gb) and a fecking slow mechanical drive. Seriously tempted to upgrade the ram and slap in an SSD myself, even if it has to be on the quiet.