anti-virus

[Willy5157]

I bought a new Dell PC last year with Windows 7. It came with McAfee anti-virus for 15 mos. IE was always bogged down. I read online that it was a common problem with Windows 7 and IE. I installed Firefox and it was a little better but not much.

My free subscription to McAfee expired this month so I installed Avast.

Now my surfing is as fast as ever. Was McAfee the source of my problems???

[aedipuss]

some paid a/v use link pre-scanners and they do slow down surfing. free a/v usually doesn't have the "feature". mcafee has a bad rep and has for years period.

[jman98]

I've felt pretty strongly for years that "friends don't let friends use McAfee". In general I'm also not really fond of the Norton product family either with some exceptions (Ghost is one), but they are somewhat more benign than McAfee. I work in IT for a living and I can tell you that the IT people I have worked with NEVER have installed McAfee on their home servers.

[davexnet]

Perhaps give MSE a try.

[fritzi93]

Perhaps give MSE a try.

I'd be interested in learning members' opinions on that one.

Anyway, I used to use Avast and liked it. Then I gave the new version a try on my new build. The newer Avast is a lot heavier, and was always bugging me to sandbox programs, which then didn't work properly of course. Uninstalled it.

I confess I haven't regularly used an A/V program on *my* computer for years. And now that I built a new one and my older one is now the office computer (mostly used by my wife), it doesn't have any either, just SpywareBlaster, along with a couple on-demand scanners, MBAM and SAS. And of course firewalls on the computers and router. I image the computers weekly though.

A VM is really convenient for getting on the internet; anything stuffs up and you burn it down, then replace it with a copy you saved on another hard drive.

Personally, I wonder just how valuable *any* of the popular A/V programs are. My admittedly limited experience leads me to think one can get by quite nicely without.

[johns0]

I switched from avast to mse and it's much better,less of a footprint on system resources.

[joy]

Another satisfied user of mse!

[davexnet]

I also did the Avast to MSE switch; after the problems of version 6.x with XP, I gave up on it.
I recommend it. I find it to be light weight and unobtrusive.

[usually_quiet]

I switched to MSE from Avast earlier this year because Avast suddenly began causing BSOD's. MSE doesn't get good marks on everyone's anti-virus tests, but tends to do well on many.

[p_l]

On various computers I have Avast, Comodo, AVG and Microsoft Security Essentials.

MSE definitely has a discreet footprint and is fairly transparent with system resources. I have it on a couple of machines.

On one 64-bit machine I went with Comodo Internet Security because it also has a pretty good firewall that can control inbound and outbound traffic, and at the time there were no plans for ZoneAlarm to support 64-bit machines. I haven't checked back recently to see if they now do. I used to use ZoneAlarm for years.

Is it me or has AVG become heavier in recent years? Then Avast has also followed that pattern and become heavier as well, I sense.

I haven't been back to check out Norton in years now. It had become a monster, a real drain on resources like McAfee.

So I'm left installing MSE these days. It's light and transparent, but I still wonder just how much I can trust it. I remember reading some pretty good reviews about a year ago, but I still have some perhaps unfounded lingering doubts, maybe only because it's Microsoft.

[fritzi93]

So I'm left installing MSE these days. It's light and transparent, but I still wonder just how much I can trust it.

There's the rub. How far do you trust any of them? Or system restore, for that matter? (Haven't used it in years now). Anything really nasty is likely to get into system restore as well.

[davexnet]

Many AV technicians will tell you to temporarily scrap SR if you have a significant virus. In many cases,
if you caught something real malicious it will damage SR and you will not be able use it to get you out
of the mess you're in.

I've been infected with some minor spyware in the past, and I was able to use SR to "undo" the damage.
But I got lucky, you can't depend on that.

[MJA]

I switched to MSE too.

[thezanny]

I use Eset and I gotta say, it's the best

[zoobie]

I switched to MSE from Avast earlier this year because Avast suddenly began causing BSOD's. MSE doesn't get good marks on everyone's anti-virus tests, but tends to do well on many.

I wondered what was causing this...I get BSOD about 2ce a month running Avast.
Some viruses go into your security setup and turn it off...as well as erase SR restore points. Someone has a current post about this mess.

[p_l]

So I'm left installing MSE these days. It's light and transparent, but I still wonder just how much I can trust it.

There's the rub. How far do you trust any of them? Or system restore, for that matter? (Haven't used it in years now). Anything really nasty is likely to get into system restore as well.

Which is why ultimately the best anti-virus is a disc image, IMHO. I used to use Ghost, now I use Acronis, but there are others.

[handyguy]

Also get Malwarebytes.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

short version (what I should have written):
I'm using Avast myself, mainly because it works on XP pre service pack, however I'm using an old version due to compatibility problems with the newer ones. For a firewall I use GhostWall (Wayback Machine Link).

Considering their history with virus protection, it would take a lot to get me using anything Microsoft related for the job, even if it would work with my version of XP.

Long Version (what I ended up writing):
I chose Avast some time ago based partly on the generally satisfactory results of some AV comparative tests (Found at the website virus.gr), but mainly on compatibility with my version of pre SP Win XP ( I'm convinced later versions of XP are bloatware). Since then those tests appear to be contradicting themselves so much that one leaves them knowing little more than before, and I suspect that some results are based more closely on a hand shake than an actual test, if you know what I mean.

An attempt to upgrade to Version 6 (which I didn't realise had dropped support for pre SP2 XP) sent XP into a cycle of reboots when trying to start up (never had a virus do anything that nasty). Luckily, I was able to kill it in safe mode and I downgraded to the last release of Avast 5.

After a some time using this, a strange problem began to occur where XP would prompt for a floppy disk to be in the floppy drive every time I, or XP wanted to load something (including all through startup). Even with a floppy in both my drives (yes my set up is an odd one), the constant checking lead to a huge boot time and I had my floppy drives disabled in BIOS for weeks before I finally tried uninstalling Avast in desperation. Which of course solved everything.

So now I'm back even further in the Avast timeline, using version 5.0.677 (downloaded from here) which seems to be the newest my system can take. 30MB RAM use seems a bit rich to me, but I've not got much choice.

With the Avast shields supposably monitoring the content of data, I use GhostWall to lock down communications to only those which I have a use for.

[ranchhand]

Been using Avira free for several years, put it on my wife's computer and both (college) kids, no problems and very high catch rate. Avira free lately is using a random ad "bubble" from the system tray - I will admit it is very low profile - but I run Comodo Firewall and I blacklisted it so no more ads. I can't fault them though.. a small popup ad occasionally in the system tray for the tops in AV protection - i can't complain. No hit on system performance that I can detect, although I do not run the realtime scanner.

[magillagorilla]

MSE is very lean, I'm a big fan. My second choice is AVG free. In the late 90's and early 2000's I was a big fan of Norton but now it's bloated and a resource hog. Mcafee has always been junk. I don't know how they stay in business.

Just install MSE and stay off Pirate Bay.