OT Anti virus sorftware

[dennis]

There is no farting about, try running win 10 before you judge it.

[Adrian Caspersz]

No. Just stick with the free version*, it will do the basic functionality of on demand scanning and protection should you accidentally run something you shouldn't have.

BTW in Avast, in settings, Notifications - you can put a tick in 'Use silent mode and turn off all Pop-ups, alerts and messages'. I'm sure hoping* it will ignore that setting when it really does find something.

• - as that I'm turning silent mode on now to avoid dumb messages informing me that I have 324MB of junk on my hard drive and my W7 machine is at risk of slowing down.

The full featured versions of these programs are probably not understood very well by the folks that they are aimed it.

But FUD sells.

Worth being aware of

and if you have kids (and inappropriate adults) using facebook - I have folks that are incapable of understanding the security meaning of the materials in the last sentence, and when their machines come here to be looked at, Windows gets removed and replaced with Linux - or they get sent in the direction of Apple (and I never hear from them again)

[mm0fmf]

All of which is completely f****ng useless advice. If he wanted Linux he'd been running it and wouldn't be asking questions about Windows.

Microsoft's own stuff (standard in W10, you need to install it W7) works fine.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Why would some one who is sick of spam from Avast want to run Windows 10 which is incredibly even more spammy?

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

[Tim Streater]

That's a fairly shitty version. 7 is much better, there's less fluff (although even there it takes a bit of configuring to get rid of all the flashing shit and popup stuff as you move the mouse about). I have each running in a VM for testing.

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

[T i m]

<snip>

Of course the *nix boys will say 'ah, but maybe you have a virus just that the AV software can't detect it ...' but then that's what they are instructed to say in the '*nix Lovers Bible'. ;-)

I now have AVG, Malwarebytes, ZoneAlarm and Superantispyware, and run them now and again and generally only ever see cookies.

I wouldn't (can't really) trade the tiny amount of time I spend on / with any of those tools against the much greater loss of convenience when trying to make use of Linux / OSX.

But then I guess that's most predictable, the world still being very much Windows-centric on the desktop.

The real shame (for 'ordinary users') is that 'Linux' hasn't evolved further than it has so far. It's getting there with popular distros like Mint providing a 'Windows-alike' admin / user experience (with GUI Control Panel like applets becoming more apparent), and it *could* get much better / faster if only the Linux community got together and spent less time forking distros all over the place. ;-(

Modern Apple machines can now get round this by also running Windows directly so the users can have a real choice.

There are some cute features of the 'alternative' OS's of course. With Apple machines I like the MagSafe adaptor and the fact you can easily run the OS on an external drive, also an advantage of Linux of course and that doesn't need a Mac to do so.

I also use Linux as a tool, generally keeping a (Multiboot) USB pen drive in my pocket and some Linux boot DVD's in the car (for things like gparted).

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

They could get someone in who knows about these things to (effectively) turn all the spam off for them? ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[alan_m]

+1 They both used to have minimal impact on the OS and file system but around 10+ years ago they were updated to behave differently. One of them, I cannot recall which, started creating its own check files in every single directory on the machine which remained even after uninstalling the program.

I also consider McAfee to be some sort of Maleware that often seems to be included as part of the packages when you purchase a Win10 machine and ignores the fact that it could be "fighting" the virus checking inbuilt to Win10. I have found that totally being rid of Mcaffee can be a chore as even after running the uninstall procedure it still leaves a nag facility telling you that the virus data base is out of date and offering to update it with a click of a button. Clicking on update may result in McAfee being reinstalled!

Earlier in the years I helped someone speed up their windows 10 machine. They were effectively using 3 real time virus check programs in parallel. One virus program was removed, one had the real time aspects disabled and the third (Windows 10 virus checker) was left to do its own thing. This speeded up the machine considerably.

[dennis]

That would be true of linux too.

[T i m]

And could have been there for *years*, along with all sorts of security risks, completely unseen by the millions of eyes, supposed to be looking out for such things ...

Cheers, T i m

[polygonum_on_google]

+1 +1 +1

[Dave W]

<snip>

+1. I've never used any antivirus, avoiding all the slowing down and interference. I get the impression they just run down their long list of viruses and will probably not catch a new one.

[John Rumm]

The inbuilt is disabled if you install Avast.

[T i m]

There is that.

Whilst they may not catch the *very* latest one(s), I believe they generally update the AV database fairly quickly and should catch stuff that is quite recent (and older of course).

Just checked my AVG Free and that was updated 7 hours ago and checking now, it says it's already up-to-date.

However, the last (manual) scan was done 7 months ago, and this is an XP machine (running on a Mac Mini). Now running a deep scan as I type ... ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Since its probably their Internet Security package (they have ditched the basic AV version now), then its a resonable price will offer better protection. (updates happen every 4 hours on the paid for versions, rather than daily for the free ones)

Well that does not match my own experience - although I typically install AVG CloudCare rather than the consumer version. I have been using it for several yours on a few hundred machines. In terms of its effectiveness, it typically does reasonably well in the comparisons. The impact on system performance is typically also less than many of the common ones, and the false positive rate is about middle of the field. Generally uninstalling is easy. They do have a removal tool that will take off broken installs if needed.

There are cases where it can be worth using the bundled ones (mainly where cost is the most important factor), but impact on system performance is a bit higher than many.

Well there is often no cure for stupid. In those cases of the internet security suits can be handy - since they will often block web impersonation sites and phishing attempts.

[John Rumm]

You can't really assess any AV program based on what they did ten years ago. They are all completely different technology platforms now. Each of the big players went through a phase of having massive impact on system performance, but they have also come out the other side with much higher performing detection engines.

[Brian Gaff]

Avast is the biggest virus I ever came across. It gets into everything and removing it can seriously damage many applications and the registry of a perfectly good machine. It also in the first place uses underhand techniques to install itself without telling you and to add to the list is completely inaccessible to screenreaders, indeed it stops many APIs that they use getting to the software at all.

That is my opinion and I'd tend to use the Windows normal inbuilt system and add Malwarebytes to it for scanning. Also add anything security related you can to the browser, but not AVG or Avast crap. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I see win 10 is actually going to work for a hear before it massively changes again but I'm still annoyed with its tendency to not ask about software it does not like. It really should give you the option to keep it and let you do the sorting out, rather than trashing it and then you have to find an alternative but your data is almost unrecoverable. Its arrogant in the Extreme. This is why I consider windows 7 to be better. I hae adapted many bits of software to work, including Outlook Express that do not run in10, or maybe run in an early 10 but not on the new one without warning. Bah humbug. Brian