Antivirus Recommendations

uean

Hey,

This is probably a hot topic and discussed many times, so please bear with me as I outline my needs here.

We run a small NGO in Uganda. We're located in the middle of nowhere, and have satellite internet which is very pricey to access, with a 3gig cap per month on bandwidth. This is to be used by everyone here, so we all do our part to try not to use the net too much.

Viruses out here are just insane. There are people who are chronically infested with viruses, all the time. The trouble is, due to bandwidth limits, and some abuse of the net, we don't allow everyone with a computer to use the internet here, and thus the virus programs in use are mostly out of date on those computers.

What I'd like is recommendations on the best antivirus software out there... free is fine, but I dont care if we have to pay. If we did we would need around 15 licenses to cover the computers here. My ideal solution would be to apply the latest virus definitions through the network. This is just a home network through a router and a copy of XP Pro, so I'd just ask everyone to come into the office once a week, hook up to the network, and then, if at all possible, have me download the latest definition once, then patch up all of the computers that come in. This is rather than them all individually downloading the update.

Does anything like this exist?

Feel free to spiral out of control into an antivirus war. I also want to know what the best option is here for the two or three computers that need it, be it GData, or a paid version of Avira, or whatever. All I do know is that AVG free is awful, and paid McAffee is about as bad, both failing to detect almost everything thrown at them from what I've seen.

Tofystedeth

Avast does have a page where you can manually download updates which you'd be able to deploy later. Unfortunately, it looks like it's inclusive so it's currently 30MB, but I guess for a weekly deal that's not too bad.
Also I hear the version 5 of Avast is more annoying than the old one.

Idoliside

Ive been using Microsoft Security Essentials for a while, and its rated very highly, although I've heard for paying options that NOD32 is the best.

Tofystedeth

Yeah, I didn't mention MSE (even though I've heard lots of good things about it) because I didn't know how to go about manually updating it, but I looked it up in case you wanna give it a whirl.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971606

uean

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Avast does have a page where you can manually download updates which you'd be able to deploy later. Unfortunately, it looks like it's inclusive so it's currently 30MB, but I guess for a weekly deal that's not too bad.
Also I hear the version 5 of Avast is more annoying than the old one.

Looks like that's the problem with most of them AVG supports this (inclusive) and the link you provided below is inclusive as well (48.5M right now).

Beginning to wonder if it is possible to download updates between certain revision levels (like, definitions between 1/1/2010 and 2/1/2010). So far it doesn't look like it.

I know MSE is loved on this forum. I'm wondering why.

Alecthar

Because it's free, relatively unobtrusive, and it doesn't devour processor cycles. Assuming you aren't trolling the internet for viruses, it provides sufficient protection as long as you're backing it up with solid anti-spy/malware programs.