Anti-Virus Software

[Man at B&Q]

At work we have McAfee. The only "viruses" it seems to detect are .exe files or .exe files in a .zip as attachments to e-mail, usually when the recipient needs them. Esay to get round by renaming the attachment as it's based on simple filename rules. We've had one infection in 10 years and that was because the AV software is *always* playing catch- up with the virus writers.

At home I don't run AV routinely. Occasionally I've tried the free trial version of well known brands and found absolutely nothing.

If you can scrae enough people you can make a lot of money.

MBQ

[gb]

Have a look at Trend. Their product takes some beating, but it's not free. Reasonably priced, though, for home user.

Geoff Beale

[Mike Barnes]

Clive George :

But only for the domestic media server. Windows XP came with the PC.

[Richard]

Have a look around this site:

laptops (one XP the other Vista) and one XP desktop on a router in use here. In the past few years have used Avira (free), ESET Smart Security (paid) and Kaspersky Internet Security (free from online bank). Most recently it was Kaspersky. I've ditched that on the two XP machines because it seemed to be making them slower than they already are. On those, I am currently running Microsoft Security Essentials with windows firewall enabled. On all the computers, Malwarebytes' Anti Malware is run occasionally and SpywareBlaster is installed.

Dunno if that'll help you or confuse you.

Richard

[PeterC]

True, but better than having no FW.

[John Rumm]

You want to try using one of the MS Server products as a server - the licensing soon becomes a right and very expensive PITA!

[Clive George]

Oh, I know :-)

[Adrian]

John Rumm gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Yep. Thick end of £800+vat. For one sodding server. Just as well we didn't need any CALs too, eh?

[Huge]

H*ly sh*t.

And we've got thousands (and no, I'm not exaggerating) of them. That'll be why everyone wants to use Linux instead, then.

[Adrian]

Huge gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

That'll be why this is the first Win server in a company that's otherwise entirely Linux servers. If only BES ran on Linux...

It could have been a chunk less - if we weren't running it as a VM, thereby knocking an OEM licence out of the window.

[John Rumm]

Version 7.5 certainly was heading that way, 9 has reversed the trend somewhat. Its worth noting that none of the AV packages are what one might call lightweight. Hardware more than 5 years old is going to take a noticeable performance hit.

[John Rumm]

Indeed - try a terminal server setup. You need the server, cals for every client, and TS cals as well IIRC.

There was a time that if you bought a "Pro" version windows desktop then it automatically included the CAL for the server. However MS decided this was too "confusing" for their customer base, and simplified things by letting you buy a CAL instead!

[Dave Osborne]

Re-install of existing 32bit version...

[Dave Osborne]

[geoff]

In message , Mike Barnes writes

Anything it thinks is malware

[Gareth]

I use the free version of AVG on hardware more than five years old and, although the PC takes a while to completely finish booting up, I find performance acceptable once everything has settled down. Of course it could well be that it would be a lot faster without AVG installed.

The main reason I use AVG is that it is free.

[Huge]

Aaaeeiiiii!!!!! Run away! Run away!

[Dave N]

Gareth wrote, on 05/08/2010 21:20:

You might also like to take a look at Avast which is also free for personal use. My experience was that Avast didn't use as many system resources as AVG when I changed over about a year ago. Undoubtedly both applications will have been updated significantly since then so that may no longer be true.

[Mike Barnes]

geoff :

What sort of things are they? I ask because mine's been running for nearly a year now and has never found anything other the EICAR I planted to test it.

[John Rumm]

Avast is probably slightly lighter, but there is not much in it. The main hit on AVG and Avast on old hardware is not actually the file access time, but the patch time (i.e. downloading and applying updates) and the memory usage. So a 512MB XP SP3 machine will run ok without AV, but with it you often find it too close to the limit on RAM and it soon starts paging and hence the performance dives. With really old stuff the patch time gets excessive. I have a 600MHz PIII laptop, if its been off for more than a few days, will take 40 mins to be useable from a cold boot by the time AVG has decompressed all the updates and applied them.

Both are streets ahead of Norton that seems to reduce file access speed to a crawl.