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Lightweight and effective antivirus to buy?
Korlash
QuébécoisTorontoRegistered User regular
QuébécoisTorontoRegistered User regular
Hey there. I did a search on this subject, but it seems this forum is full of cheap people as everyone always makes requests for free antivirus software 
.
So, since my norton subscription ended yesterday, I'm looking for a good antivirus to buy. Now, I heard some nice things about kapersky but I hear it's just as slow as Norton, which is a big issue for me. I must admit I've never had a virus with Norton running, but it significantly increase the time required for my computer to start up, and it slows it afterwards.
I've also heard of NOD32, that it is very lightweight, but I also read that it doesn't offer as much protection as Norton and Kapersky.
Is there any antivirus that is both lightweight and efficient, or am I stuck with bloated software?
.So, since my norton subscription ended yesterday, I'm looking for a good antivirus to buy. Now, I heard some nice things about kapersky but I hear it's just as slow as Norton, which is a big issue for me. I must admit I've never had a virus with Norton running, but it significantly increase the time required for my computer to start up, and it slows it afterwards.
I've also heard of NOD32, that it is very lightweight, but I also read that it doesn't offer as much protection as Norton and Kapersky.
Is there any antivirus that is both lightweight and efficient, or am I stuck with bloated software?
Korlash on
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The ones I've used are all kinda bloated but seem to work well:
Norton, kaspersky, AVG,mcCafee
Although the only paid version of anti virus software I've used is Norton and I haven't used mccafee in years and years...
My experience is that the free AVG is doing as well as the paid for Norton was.
There are two lame solutions I can offer to bloated anti virus,
Faster computer
Use "sleep" instead of shut off, boot time = 2 seconds.
avast is what i'm using on one of my computers, my understanding is that its basically the a version of kaspersky
http://ca.com/us/products/product.aspx?ID=156
personally, I run AVG.
Ah i wouldn't know, never tried kaspersky let alone its different versions. But it stays out of my way well enough and is on the ball viruswise.
However, it's your decision to buy or use it, so if I had to recommend any, Id use Trend Micro's, which has a free online scan and boxed version you can purchase.
sure 99% can be beaten by smart computing, which mostly we don't do (you check hashes?) but that 1% is a bitch.
Well there's the fact that most of the info I've read points to paid software being better. I've always paid for my antivirus.
Besides, I use paypal with this computer, so I'd rather be more secure than I need to.
I'd avoid AVG as the newer versions are considerably more bulky than in the past and it's covered with nag screens asking you to buy the full version. You should never consider Norton or McAfee, as they're extremely bulky and generally ineffective. Kaspersky and Avast! generally have good reviews, although I've had only limited exposure to them. I've used both Trend Micro's PC-Cillin and Bit-defender in the past, but moved away from them as they added extra "features" that caused them to affect the performance of my PC. When PC-cillin and bit-defender were stand-alone antivirus software they were fine, but once the firewall and spam protection functionality was added in they became too bloated for use.
Don't listen to anyone who tells you that you don't need antivirus software. No matter how careful you are you can still end up with one... just a few days ago there were more reports of a banner ad company whose ads contained some sort of exploit. If you must run without AV software, at least disable Java in your web browser (it helps a lot, believe me. I've been doing this for a while).
Good luck!
Since then I've just been back to AVG, I've never had any trouble personally.
That's what I run, and I've had a grand total of one virus, which I was dumb enough to install myself. I do an online scan with Trend Micro every few months, never find anything. As long as you're not running Internet Explorer or Outlook, there's really no reason to bother.
I also have to recommend Trend Micro's online scanner. It's fairly fast, only requires an active-x or java plug in and only runs when you tell it to. Given the general trend of using various anti-virus programs as the first targets or even as a form of shelter, the online option insures you get a working scanner.
Do you have the flash plugin installed in your ultra-secure Firefox? What about Java? Acrobat Reader? QuickTime? RealPlayer? Does your browser open MP3s in WinAmp directly?
The point is that more and more exploits are hitting targets that aren't the browser, your OS, or your email client, and these things are the things that aren't getting updated by Windows Update, which at least actively tries to keep you up to date.
My issue with current antiviruses is that it's very tough to tell whether they're keeping up with the increasingly fast-paced arms race that is malware. Does anybody know if NOD32 or Avast! or AVG will prevent you from getting hit with Virtumonde / Vundo / Virtumondo or any one of the dozens of SmitFraud variants?
I know almost certainly that once you do get hit, these won't fix them, and in fact you need a cocktail of freely-available infection-specific programs, plus some experienced help with HijackThis!, to get rid of them once you get them. I guarantee I have seen more than one fully patched machine get hit with these, and I've never figured out what the attack vector was. Zero-day exploit? Maybe. A very slightly out-of-date helper application in the browser? Coulda been. These machines were running antiviruses at the time. After scraping this shit off more than one machine, I noticed that the nasties were getting smarter, to the point that they were actively preventing me from running the programs that would fix them.
If there's an argument for "none," it's not that practicing responsible computing will prevent you from getting hit. Unfortunately, it may be that they're just ineffectual anyway. Anything's better than nothing, though, and so if one of these things happens to stop a SmitFraud .DLL from running on your machine and prevents a bad infection from barfing all over your system, it's worth it.
I used to use AVG, but now I'm on Avast. I'm not sure if I like it more or not, I've only had it a short while. It seems to be slowing my system down more, which is never good...
water spirals the wrong way out the sink
Very small resource footprint (three active processes for about 11,500k total), very unobtrusive/hidden interface, very user-friendly, daily definition updates, rootkit detection, and it is totally free.
I've never had problems with false positives, I see it detect maybe a virus or so every two weeks (i use IE and outlook), and i've never in several years of use had a virus become active on my system. (At first, I double checked my system status with several other online detection methods to make sure AntiVir was doing its job).
The only price you pay is a single pop-up ad window that offers their premium/business service each time you update the definitions.
One click per day to close the window is worth it to me, in lieu of a monthly charge and bloated-ass invasive program.
On my Windows machine I used to use AVG but it was interfering with Source-engine games, causing frequent crashes. Something about paged pool memory. I switched to Anti-Vir but didn't want to deal with its adware. So now I use Avast, and it's working really well. No conflicts that I've found, and reasonably lightweight.
Yeah AVG does that with a few games too. I recommend Avast as well.
I'll also keep NOD32 in mind.
Also, as I said, I already know of some free antivirus, but really, I would much rather pay ~50$ per year to be certain that my computer and personal information will be safe.
And I will probably dual-boot windows and unbuntu on my next computer, but this one will stay on windows.