Antivir or Avast?
i have currently both installed (downloaded avast today) and id like to have only 1 lol as its enough, so id like to know what u guys think
Can't say which is better, but I have avast installed. Prior to that I had AntiVir, but for me it somehow started to feel bloaty and... how to say... scaremonger-ish, just like the majority of the "popular" big anti virus products.
Also I had one incident where I got a virus over a Hamachi network share, and AntiVir wasn't able to cope with it. It did immediately find the infected files, but the process that was infecting the files wasn't stopped, so only my quick intervention saved me from further trouble. I guess because of that, my trust in AntiVir took a hit, too.
yea.... i used antivir for ages now, but ive been thinking maybe avast is better.
not that i had problems with it...but these days u need max security and im not sure if antivir can give me that.
Been using Antivir for years, have recommended to loads of people in the past, and have always been happy with it.....
BUT
As there is minmal support for 64 bit OS, I have installed Avast on my x64 and Vista beta machine...so far so good, although it does take longer to initialise than Antivir.
Not sure if that is down to me and the configuration yet, but both seem sound...In fact, Avast seems to pick up suspect e-mails better than Antivir..at least, I get warnings that I have never had before!
@herki: That's true. I'd say about 90% of the difference is made by the user, but I want to have something I can trust for the last 10% - like when accidents happen, just as the virus I mentioned above. At that time I confused the open explorer windows and accidently opened a file from my friend's shared folder, causing the infection on my system. In THAT case I'd still like a anti virus software that protects me, not one that sits there and just notices me of the files that got infected.
while browsing the forum here, im running a virus scan with avast.
and guess what? it found a virus while antivir didnt. and its just normal mode not deepscan (however its called in english) as i want to play today!
I don't open suspicous files on my friends' shared folders... If I open any of them, they are safe, because they don't have viruses, they are too experienced for that
On my PC I use for the forums and stuff (basically my file-server, LFS runs on my laptop in multiplayer ) I have no Anit-Virus-software installed at all, not even a firewall, but my router blocks every port I don't allow it not to block
And on my laptop there isn't any important stuff which isn't regulary backuped, so I don't need AV-software there too, I simply can format it and load my HDD-image of my fail-safe fresh install of Windows
Indeed! a cool challenge. I've messed with them for the past 17 years, everything from the Robert Morris worm to joining a large group of other IRC admins to strip the (now old) Fizzer worm apart.
Personally I do all my testing in vmware (not connected to anything network-wise) with a collection totaling over 2.5Gb (many source codes too).. certainly saved my rear end a couple of times and many friends knowing the ins and outs Not often I see others enjoying such challenges
My recommendation would be F-Prot. Have used it since DOS was my primary OS, although not free, very reasonably priced with free definition updates etc (not like norton's subscription based crap for example).
For a free scanner, I'd say ClamWin. It's a windoze port of the Unix version which I've been using for a while as a "2nd opinion" scanner, but it's been running on both of my Unix mailservers for the past couple of years and touch wood, yet to let anything through
The last worm I killed was W32/Brontok... it was on a CD the boyfriend of my sister brought from their vacation - burned on a South American PC ... don't ask me how you can get a worm on a CD by burning pictures from a SD-card on a CD, but there were suspicious .exe files on the CD, so I burned a new CD, only with the pics and tried the worm...
It's main features are:
• disabling registry (solution: secpol.msc)
• disabling filename extension and folder option (solution: registry)
• and some "system"-processes, which close some apps or shutdown the pc immediatly (I think they didn't like cmd and the task manager)
but once you know, what the worm did and you know a little bit about your files which should be run, it's quite easy to get rid of them
forgot to mention:
• creates a lot of *.exe-files, which are supposed to look like windows-folders (careful if you didn't turn filename extensions on again)
You can't compare them, Avast is full product, while antivir is something hobbyist has made, well at least so it feels
Antivirus software should be automatic, transparent that is not allowing user to even see anything harmful, it should destroy things before anything arrives to computer, this is why I prefer Avast over Norton, F-Secure or any other antivirus software
I've used AVG Free on multiple computers for a long time, and it's always worked well and intercepted problems before they ... um... become problems. It stays out of the way and seems to update itself pretty frequently.
I used to use antiVir, but then it started having those updating-problems. Couldn't even load new definition files. It was clear, that they wanted to smoke freeloaders into paying customers. That wasn't a problem in itself, but when the program got heavier and the support to paying customers got worse (few friends purchased it), I decided to go for avast.
Same here I used it over many many years (and sold it a lot of times as a reseller) But to me antiVir only makes sense when you got the full version (incl. E-mail scanner).
I tested the free AVG version some time ago. And was really surprised.
I has everything I needed. Great Update Manager, Scheduler, E-mail scanner etc. (I usually got viruses by E-mail so it was an important factor for me) .
It runs silently in the background (like an anti virus prog should) without any problems at all. And it's free
My experience from avg is that some viruses pass trough it like nothing, quite many virus infected computers had avg or antivir when my job was to fix computers.
Sure I've seen the same things (with all kinds of free or bought antivirus programms when doing the same job as you.)
But tbh in 99% of the cases it was the inability of the users (or system admins ). No OS updates, click on everything online, open every attachment, trying to get cheats or game keys over the net etc.
Anyway I'm not saying AVG is the best or 100% save (as 100% doesn't exist). It just works for me (personally)
(Edit: in combination with other things of course. Like spybot i.e.)
Installing Firefox and changing whatever antivirus they had to Avast has been 95% cure, rest did continue to use IE or uninstalled avast because they got so good offer from some antivirus company, lol
Sure it is mostly user error, in some rare cases however I have found my Avast being saving angel, driving italia page for example once had ad that contained some malware, Avast did block it without any trouble, many other would not been doing that as malware/spyware protection has been quite bad in most of antivirus software packages, some have added external program for the job, causing more system resources being drawn. Yes, I'm enough old to miss programming where programs are actually done so that least possible resources are consumed
)
illepall 
