Free Anti-Virus software

paugie

Storage is cool
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Dec 13, 2003
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Bulacan, Philippines
Avast is better, hand down. But Antivir is supposedly even better. The only negative point of Antivir is that it failed the last series of tests from Virus Bulletin.

I installed and continue to update the AVG in the work PC. I'll check out Avast. But how can something (Antivir) be better when it failed the test? Different parameters?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Jan 17, 2002
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I am omnipresent
I am going to step in and say something nice about AVG:
You install it.
It updates every day, on its own.
It does a scan every day, on its own (which can be obnoxious on older PCs)
It's vastly lighter in terms of system resources when compared to Norton/McAfee.

You don't have to fuss around with registering it to make it work as you do with Avast.

It's a fire and forget solution. That is a very good thing about it.

The only bad thing about AVG from my point of view is that it does not like being part of a prepared disk image, but that's something other people don't deal with.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 21, 2002
Messages
8,728
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Québec, Québec
I have absolutely no idea WTF this thread is doing or saying. It doesn't make any sense at all.
How can you not see the link between baby's food and virii? Baby's food makes babies crap. Virii makes computers crap. It's crystal clear.

So next time you do your groceries and cross baby's food, remember that Antivir is your computer's diaper. Get it?

[/humour]

And sorry for the broken links in my previous post. I didn't realize the pages could only be accessed from their web site's main portal.
 

Adcadet

Storage Freak
Joined
Jan 14, 2002
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44.8, -91.5
I am going to step in and say something nice about AVG:
You install it.
It updates every day, on its own.
It does a scan every day, on its own (which can be obnoxious on older PCs)
It's vastly lighter in terms of system resources when compared to Norton/McAfee.

You don't have to fuss around with registering it to make it work as you do with Avast.

It's a fire and forget solution. That is a very good thing about it.

The only bad thing about AVG from my point of view is that it does not like being part of a prepared disk image, but that's something other people don't deal with.
I agree with all of the above (I have no knowledge of the prepared disk image business), and I'm really happy with AVG.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
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Jan 22, 2002
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Michigan
FWIW: Antivir seems awfully paranoid... It's heuristics scanner goes off from time to time over nothing.
 

Clocker

Storage? I am Storage!
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Jan 14, 2002
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USA
Seems like every now and then, AVG just wants to stop updating and you have to uninstall and then install the latest free version. Any cure for that? Just got an email from my dad...it's stopped updating again even though I put the latest version on about a month or two ago (because it said to upgrade)...
 

paugie

Storage is cool
Joined
Dec 13, 2003
Messages
702
Location
Bulacan, Philippines
Seems like every now and then, AVG just wants to stop updating and you have to uninstall and then install the latest free version. Any cure for that? Just got an email from my dad...it's stopped updating again even though I put the latest version on about a month or two ago (because it said to upgrade)...

I think I know this.
AVG's update process will halt when it encounters a quirk in the internet connection. It happens from time to time. It coughs up an error message. One just has to try updating at a different time.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I am omnipresent
Article about the basics of Antivirus software from consumerist.com.

The Consumerist is not a tech web site. It's a pretty interesting place for consumer rights information, and it's good to see some of the things we've largely been saying repeated there. I don't agree with the author's assessment of AVG but everything else seems right. It's a good thing to wave around to the idiots who demand Norton.

Also, Necro-thread FTW!
 

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Feb 7, 2002
Messages
2,016
Location
Canberra
How well do AV programs do in detecting unknown virii?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...outdo-those-of-symantec-mcafee-microsoft.html

NOD it is

..."The test looked at 17 different products, including offerings from Symantec, McAfee, AVG, Kaspersky, and Microsoft, and tested how well releases dated February 2 (with no updates) fared against a swath of new malware—viruses, scripts, trojans, and other nasties—that were discovered between February 2 and May 2. Related Stories

The winner of this antivirus sweepstakes was a product called Avira, which managed to detect and defeat 71 percent of the unknown malware. Right behind it was the equally-obscure NOD32, which swept away 68 percent of the threats. The more well-known commercial products fared more poorly. Norton Antivirus and McAfee tied at a mere 24 percent, while Microsoft's OneCare did even worse by only identifying 18 percent of the new threats. Resting at the bottom of the barrel were Kaspersky and eScan at nine percent, and AVG, which detected only eight percent of malicious software in addition to producing many false positives."...
 
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