OT: Comments on AntiVirus Brands?

I use AVG from

I remove Norton and McAfee from a lot of infected computers, after cleaning the hard drive up with AVG. I install the free version on all the computers that I give away to disabled Veterans, along with AdAware and ZoneAlarm.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

"Jim Thompson"

FWIW, I used to recommend Norton over McAfee as the lesser of two evils kinda thing. Now that Norton shoves their Internet Security crap at people, I no longer see them as a tolerable alternative. Besides being incredibly slow, Norton Internet Security causes more problems than any piece of software I've ever seen. Since (as Mr. Terrell said), virii get right past them both anyway as they travel allot faster than updates.

Lately, I've been trying out the EZ Trust stuff on people. It's WAYYYYY less burdensome (

I just tried a scan... significantly faster than Norton, but who knows the efficacy.

I'm running thru an SMC Barricade which blocks all the direct attacks and I'm quite cautious of what I open.

Probably the most useful thing is Firefox' blocking of Javascript.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
     It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

evils

being

any

WAYYYYY

run

CA is a real big player in the IBM mainframe arena, sort of like MS in the PC world. They buy/crush all their competition and then rebadge the product with an inventive name like CA-1 or CA-7. Sound familiar? ;-) BTW, what version do you have (7 or 7.1?).

Two very good practices. IMO, anyone with broadband should use an external router of some sort.

Just using a different browser and e-mail client will do wonders to improve security. Of course nothing is 100% effective.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I have had both Norton and McAfee. Both had problems. Now using AGV I like it. WW

Well, it is now 3 of us for AVG ... very telling (or a statistical fluke).

I recently got hit with the Win32.Parite virus while searching for a better newsreader. This is an old virus and has been around since at least 2001:

After suspecting a virus was on my computer, I tried to run all the antivirus programs I had carefully downloaded and installed. They were all damaged by the virus and could not run. So they were competely useless.

I found the Avast Cleaner and ran it:

It removed all the infections, and running the Microsoft System File Checker confirmed all the files were restored to pristine condition.

This experience taught me a lesson. There are still plenty of old viruses around, and they can render your computer unusable by destroying the antivirus programs on your hard disk. Some will even stay resident and try to disable any AV program you try to run, so they leave your system helpless against them.

Avast is recognized as one of the top AV programs available, with among the highest virus detection rates of any AV program.

It also has a memory-resident mode that checks all programs that try to load and run. It stops viruses from loading, so they never get a chance to infect your machine.

There is a very brief pause while it checks the program, but it is hardly noticeable on my old 450MHz machine, so it should be undetectable on more modern machines. It doesn't take much memory, and there is a free version for home use:

avast! 4 Home - English version (length 10.02 MB)

As far as a new email and newsreader program, I found Pimmy to be excellent. It handles an unlimited number of email and newsgroup accounts, is very fast, and the free home version is very usable. It won't run attachments, and you have to uudecode binary files yourself so there is no possible risk of getting infected via email or newsgroup postings. I plan to upgrade to the commercial version soon to take advantage of better thread handling and other features:

Best Regards,

Mike Monett

Firefox is slow as mollasses and still has 2 out of 27 Secunia advisories marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database:

Opera is blazingly fast, has many more highly useful features, and has 0 out of 13 Secunia advisories marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database:

You can enable/disable javascript, images, cookies, and many other parameters with Alt-T, Q, and a single keystroke. Much faster and more conventient than Firefox.

Try Opera. You'll love it!

Best Wishes,

Mike Monett

[snip]

v7.0.1.4

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
     It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

Add my vote for AVG too - When I first got online I went in search of an antivirus app and found that the NAV website had been brought down by hackers! Prior to that I had been using AVG4 for DOS & Win 3.11 and had been impressed by its heuristic scan function, this apparently analyses fragments of code within a file and determines its intent to decide whether to flag an alert. This helps it keep ahead by not being entirely dependant on new virus definitions updates.

I gave up on Norton last year, switched to Mcafee. Works well, doest hog resources like norton. I also run avast on the laptop. Both are very good. I believe Mcafee had the edge over norton at the time I switched. We also use Panda at work, I dont recomend it, but it catches all the crap too.

Cheers

I use a SonicWall router, with their firewall/virus protection, and then AVG SoHo edition on the internal systems (together with a couple of spyware blockers). My opinions of the systems change with time. Norton, used to be good, and then seemed to 'loose it' a bit. McAfee, at it's 'core', seems to work well, but some of the software has been subject to specific attacks, and the default configurations can be really annoying (it is however their virus database, that is used by the SonicWall, and by several similar products). AVG, has proven to be at least as effective for several people I know, as the other products, and especially if combined with a different browser, is a 'good' solution.

Best Wishes

I use Mcafee command line version. Only run it to check downloaded files. I don't like AV stuff running in the background, too much overhead. The mail server I used to take care of used Kaspersky AV. Seems to work fine.

--
Mark

With luck, you'll avoid something like this: http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:KvF9vVAX-ZIJ:it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1322215+*-thousands-of-deleted-or-quarantined-files+anti-virus-update-*-contained-an-anomaly+March-*+McAfee+inurl:article-pl