Chris
Can anyone recommend any anti-virus software? Preferably something which actually works, and dosn't use 250Mbytes of RAM in the background.
Have been using Norton, but managed to get infected from a spam email - despite constant definition updates. And the thing uses tons of memory anyway.
Kaspersky is supposed to be about the best but it does slow things down a bit!
Cheers
Mark
AVG works just fine for me
Norton is a pile of shite if ever there was one
AVG is pretty good (and free!)
http://free.grisoft.com
The Techs at my ISP recommended AVG, best thing is its free and doesn't slow me 'puter down.
Yep, I've tried
Macafee - Nightmare to remove at times
Norton - Feels like bloatware
AVG - Good and free
CA Antivirus (Rebundled Zone alarm and a few others), good and cheap (free for a year with Vista)
NTL Netguard - Free with NTL, had viruses get past it though on friends' PCs.
AVG is good enough up to now.
Hi
I use Avast, its free and was recomended on the gadget show
http://www.avast.com/index.html
Adrian
i have been recomended avg and just installed it and done system scan and it has found a trojen. what pisses me off is that for the last couple of year i had been using norton, and still getting viruses
I was having a problem with my ISP and the tech guy asked;
"what antivirus are you using?"
Usual reply
"Norton"
"Boosh! take it off he said."
"What should I use then?"
"Anything, anything is better than Norton" was his reply!
quote:Same here!!!
Originally posted by flak monkey
AVG works just fine for me
Norton is a pile of shite if ever there was one
i use avg free and the network version for clients, highly recommend ti, dont touch norton with a barge pole, its useless.
Mac
A Mac
Chris
quote:
Originally posted by chrsgrain
A Mac
Chris
You arent immune, just a sitting target.
Avira AntiVir -- very low resources uses very effective, unobtrusive in use, unlike AVG has a pleasant looking interface and dosen't give lots
of false posatives.
http://www.avira.com
NOD 32
Best there is, or so I'm led to believe 
Mac - popular... that would be like scientology getting a mass following..... Hmmm
Chris
AVG Free for a home box, Nod32 for a client server network.
Norton not good in my opinion
Regards
Rich
AVG
Combination of AVG / Spyware search + destroy / Adaware
(after all try and seperate a virus, adware, spyware etc nowadays)...
with a quick Online Panda every few weeks.... works for me!!!!!
There is a school of thought suggesting that many of the viruses are created by the software manufacturers to 'justify' their own
program's existence ......... or am I a cynic? 
I used to use a few different progs - Norton, Panda & Sophos. I havent had anything
'protecting' me for the last two years and I'm still here
Seriously though, a lot of harmless programs & files are often flagged up as being trojans etc simply because their code has been written
badly.
[Edited on 15-2-07 by RazMan]
quote:
Originally posted by cerbera
NOD 32
Best there is, or so I'm led to believe
NOD32 is the dog's danglies, it's been consistently at the top in tests for detection rates for years,
it's small and friendly and doesn't take longer to scan a document than it takes you to read it, unlike some other products that may have
already been mentioned. It's also not hugely popular, so hasn't been a target in itself for viruses much, unlike norton/sophos etc. It
won't f*ck up your internet/email/everything like NIS tends to either.
Avast for me recommended by local techie.
Having said that I went for years without anything at home and never had a problem.
Not a major issue either for me at home as it gives me a good excuse to do a clean install and tidy things up.
At work is a different matter though.
[Edited on 15/2/07 by pajsh]
Researched this a while ago, read an article somewhere by someoneorother on the interweb who seemed well informed who'd actually tested the
various AV packages with large numbers of known infected files and saw what would infect and what wouldn't. Can't remember where, was a
year or two ago. It concluded McAfee was marginally the best, norton behind that, AVG was worst but the margin was so small that is was unlikely to
be statistically significant. Importantly ALL of them let a small percentage of viruses go undetected.
I've stuck with AVG, never gone wrong yet. Spyware has got past it a couple of times, but then it also got past norton when i used that. I use
Spybot Search and Destroy (also free) and that does away with the spyware.
Ive administered both Norton AV Corporate and CA eTrust AV at work and IMHO both are a pile of sh1te. As an example with eTrust I can drop an infected
file onto a server protected by its realtime scanner and despite the scanner being told to monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic, it doesn't
detect the infected file until the overnight scan of the entire hard drive! It will still detect if the file is executed in Windows but in some
circumstances that isn't going to stop an infection occuring.
Out of the two free products (AVG and Avast) both are pretty good but I would recommend Avast. It has far more functionality than AVG Free including
POP3 / SMTP E-Mail scanners and peer 2 peer scanning for Bittorrent etc. It also uses very little resources and I find the definition update facility
to be far more configurable and reliable than AVG, which if the machine is not switched on very often or only switched on for a short amount of time,
can persistently fail to update itself.
Chris
Ive just installed AVG on wifes laptop tonight. It seems to be taking and age to scan for virusses. 30 mins to scan 60K files and still going. Is this normal.
Good to see that etrust didn't dissapoint me, today for the second time in 3 months I had to send Computer Associates a sample of a trojan worm
that their software was unable to detect.
After they told me what it was and I looked it up online, Sophos amongst others had definitions to detect it last AUGUST!!
Until yesterday I was running AVG. I ran a full system scan, no virus's (virii?)
Uninstalled AVG and installed Avast. Full system scan found 2 virus'. 
I changed antivirus programs because I was looking for a full suite (don't mind paying for a good product) and Avast always seemed to score
better in the tests than AVG
A few points that are getting missed:
Your first line of defence is your ISP, decent ISPs have excellent mail scanning.
ALL scanners give false positives but some are much more prone to it than others, Avast seems to be by far the worst in this respect, even AVG over
reports. So just because virus scanner A reports a virus that scanner B doesn't can't be taken at face value that A is doing a better job
than B. Even my favourite Avira which has proved 100% reliable at keeping viri out over a good few years classes some legitimate software tools as
malware.
The problem with Norton isn't that it doesn't do a good job of dealing with viri but that it slows down the computer to a unacceptable
degree, this problem seems to get worse the longer Norton has been installed on the PC. I have seen problems with Norton so often that I now actually
regard all Symmantec software as malware, when a client phones up for help with a PC that is running very slowly my first question is always "Do
you have Norton installed ?" the answer is invariably yes.
The other problem with Norton is that it doesn't uninstall cleanly, even after downloading a special Norton software removal tool from Symmantecs
website.
McAfee is pretty good but Avira http://www.free-av.com/ has it all.
Hijackthis should be run before and after installing any software.
quote:
Originally posted by britishtridentYour first line of defence is your ISP, decent ISPs have excellent mail scanning.
Yes router firewalls are getting very clever, I recently installed a Be Box Speedtouch 780(WL)(i) at home and was very impressed by the wirewall
options and intrusion detection.
Be supplied the router fully configured for connection and security, only the Admin password needed to be changed.
Having said that if protecting a small business network I would use an IPCop or similar firewall between the network and the router.
[Edited on 19/2/07 by britishtrident]
Astaro is the best incarnation of a Linux firewall that Ive seen, not the easiest to set up by any stretch of the imagination but thats not suprising
as its an enterprise class firewall that competes with Checkpoint and Cisco rather than simple home user orientated appliances/software, but for
limited home use as a basic firewall its free, or fully featured (but limited to 10 internal IP addresses) its £40 / year, giving pretty much every
type of protection you could want.
[Edited on 28/2/07 by ChrisGamlin]
But IPCop is GPL "100% free" -- 100% effective, 100% reliable with great community support.
The only limitations come if you try do do something really fancy like try to get it to use two ADSL lines on the WAN (red) side.
LOL nice sales pitch
Dont get me wrong, Ive used IPCop and it's very good and certainly what Id recommend to the average home / small business user if they want
something simple and reliable to set up, but for the IT geeks amongst us, Astaro is a firewall and a little bit more.
As well as being a firewall / IPS, for £40 it also has (Kaspersky) virus/spam/phishing filtering on Email traffic, content filtering, virus and
spyware protection on all web traffic, and lots of other stuff like bandwith optimisation and SSL / IPSec VPNs etc.
Have a nosey though the online Front End / GUI demo and you'll see what I mean.
[Edited on 28/2/07 by ChrisGamlin]