Anti-Virus

Rami

So i'm looking for a decent anti-virus/trojan/spyware etc utility, to run on Vista 64bit, that isn't going to use up a load of resources and make my PC feel sluggish. I've used a few of the big name software in the past, such as Norton and McAfee, but they've always felt like they're really getting in the way and slowing my machine down.

I did take some interest in those portable USB versions, as having a separate CPU such seemed like a good one of handling it, but after researching some of them it seems they're usually quite buggy and unreliable.

Free or fee, I have no preference other then the best protection with the minimum of resources.

gneGne

For paid anti-virus services:
NOD32 or Kaspersky

Free:
Avira antivir (www.free-av.com)
Avast!
AVG

Daedalus

Of the big three free anti-virus programs (AVG, Anti-Vir, and Avast!), Avast is the only one worth using. AVG has weird incompatibilities with Half-Life 2 and other games on the Source engine, and Anti-Vir includes adware.

blakfeld

I'd say Kaspersky or Spysweeper with Antivirus. I work for Geek Squad, and those are the ones we have the best luck with. And in my opinion, when it comes to the free ones, you get what you pay for. I've found them all to be annoying and fairly usless.

Nakatomi2010

Kasersky or OneCare in my books, I work for firedog, and on all the computers we've installed OneCare on, including my own, I've never had any issues with it...

Kaspersky is, in my book, one of THE best, while OneCare is less detrimental to system performance... The newer versions are waaaay better than the older ones...

Why do I recommend OneCare? It keeps shit simple, push this button and get this result, and walks you through the process...

OneCare does one thing which I've not seen any other scanner do, which is that while you're looking at a directory and Windows is loading the icons for the files within the directory OneCare actually scans the file as you go, I've not seen any other scanner do this, and the performance hit while uses this program, is like non-existant... Hell, Norton 360 was released as Norton's answer to OneCare, but OneCare is cheaper overall....

highly recommend OneCare for best performance/cost/non-resource hogging ratio...

Rohan

Avast! is the best anti-virus software I've ever used.

Dratatoo

I also recommend Kaspersky Anti virus, pretty lightweight, is updated regularly (sometimes multiple times a day) and for me it's no resource hog. But I would recommend just buying the regular package, not the antivirus+firewall bundle. Personally I can't stand software firewalls. It should be the job of your router to filter incoming traffic.

Stay away from Norton. I don't know if it changed during its latest incarnation, but the last version I saw was very intrusive and of course a huge resource hog. It used to overlay 1/8 of your taskbar with a huge yellow button proclaiming what product you just installed. Man its worse than adware and a virus, plus, you have to pay for it. The developers failed the interface design course apparently. The enterprise edition (client-side) seems to be nice though, small client, lightweight, just a tiny icons reminds you about its existence on your system.

The best method of avoiding malware is to surf smart - or use a alternate operating system or live CD for visiting "unsave" sites :winky:. OSX and Linux usually doesn't get hit by whatever exploit the malware developer thought out for the Redmond operating system (not saying that both OSes are without any security weak-points). Personally I only store my personal information in OSX or Linux + absolutely sensitive data is encrypted.

Dark Shroud

NOD32 Anti-virus has better performance than Kaspersky. For the average user NOD32 isn't so friendly though it's a lot better now than the 2.x series. OneCare is great newbs or illiterates.

As for Norton, if it doesn't have 2008 in the title you need to kill it with fire immediately. Many versions do not have an uninstaller so use a program like Revo, it's free. The new versions of Norton are a lot better because it uses the Sygate firewall technology as well as a few other companies Symantec bought out but it's still not as good/light as the others.

ToyD

I enjoy BitDefender. Tried several out on a trial and bitdefender has a minimal interface that I am digging.

GrimReaper

I have to say after cancelling my subscription to AVG and moving over to the free version of avira the damn nagging prompt is seriously getting on my nerves. I'll be playing a game, avira will update then it'll switch me out of my game to show that pain in the motherfucking arse buy prompt.

I'm now thinking of going over to avast.

Also, using kaspersky is dangerous.. it tends to poison people with polonium or shoot them in the head at the most inopportune of times.

Dírhael

GrimReaper wrote: »

I have to say after cancelling my subscription to AVG and moving over to the free version of avira the damn nagging prompt is seriously getting on my nerves. I'll be playing a game, avira will update then it'll switch me out of my game to show that pain in the motherfucking arse buy prompt.

I'm now thinking of going over to avast.

Also, using kaspersky is dangerous.. it tends to poison people with polonium or shoot them in the head at the most inopportune of times.

You can disable that notifier, just not from within the program itself...and here's how you do it

Personally, I'm using (and have for the last couple of years) the premium version of Avira. It hardly uses any resources, it's by far one of the best at detecting malware and it doesn't get in my way unlike certain other AV tools.

Idoliside

Daedalus wrote: »

AVG has weird incompatibilities with Half-Life 2 and other games on the Source engine

I've never noticed this in all my times using AVG, and i play alot of source games.

Daedalus

Idoliside wrote: »

Daedalus wrote: »

AVG has weird incompatibilities with Half-Life 2 and other games on the Source engine

I've never noticed this in all my times using AVG, and i play alot of source games.

I'm not talking out of my ass here, it happens to a lot of people. Do a google search for "AVG" and "paged pool memory".

Rami

Thanks guys, i've had a look into kasp and nod32 and i'm definitely going to go with one of those.

Idoliside

Daedalus wrote: »

Idoliside wrote: »

Daedalus wrote: »

AVG has weird incompatibilities with Half-Life 2 and other games on the Source engine

I've never noticed this in all my times using AVG, and i play alot of source games.

I'm not talking out of my ass here, it happens to a lot of people. Do a google search for "AVG" and "paged pool memory".

Never said you were, might be a common problem. But i've had AVG and steam games on three different computers without issue.

Muriden

My vote goes to Avast!

I was using AVG but found it to be a bit bloated for my tastes, using Avast now and haven't found anything to complain about.

Stormwatcher

I just installed Avast and it's really smaller and faster than AVG
AVG alone ate somethin like 50mb of RAM.

PeregrineFalcon

Idoliside wrote: »

Daedalus wrote: »

Idoliside wrote: »

Daedalus wrote: »

AVG has weird incompatibilities with Half-Life 2 and other games on the Source engine

I've never noticed this in all my times using AVG, and i play alot of source games.

I'm not talking out of my ass here, it happens to a lot of people. Do a google search for "AVG" and "paged pool memory".

Never said you were, might be a common problem. But i've had AVG and steam games on three different computers without issue.

+1 to the "Never had issues with AVG+Steam" crew - but I'd never heard of this before.

Of course, now that I have, it's going to shit itself right as I'm about to hadouken Flippy or some shit tonight. :x

1ddqd

Avast for Antivirus, or Spysweeper + Antivirus.

Spysweeper + A/V is a monster, it's REALLY great at catching everything (I think it's $59 for a box and you get 3 licenses)

Haikira

Throwing my vote in for avast too, its a serious step up from AVG.

Ego

Avast is very good software. I would usually recommend it over AVG except where the user requires a somewhat simpler program (AVG is more intuitive for novices.) It has great performance and some of the features (like scans on boot before windows loads) are just not something you'd expect in free software.

Sarathai

NOD32 is the best paid-for antivirus. Kaspersky is excellent at cleaning up an already infected machine, but NOD32 is better at keeping you from getting infected in the first place and has less impact on boot times. Neither has a significant impact on performance once Windows has loaded. Either way, make sure you get the antivirus and not the security suite. Comodo makes a better firewall than either of the two for free.

If you're not willing to pay, Avast! and Avira are both decent choices. Avira seemed more lightweight when I was using it and it catches more threats, but it has two major caveats. It has a very high rate of false positives; identifying files as malware when they are perfectly harmless. You also do have to jump thru some hoops to disable its nag screen telling you to buy the paid version, as Dìrhael has already mentioned.

Helpless Rock

It it kind of redundant of me me be running AVG-Free and Avast at the same time? AVG seems to work better as a daily-ish scanner, but Avast I have had actually pop up a warning saying "Hey, warning, don't click that." (albeit a few times when there actually was nothing) that reassures me. I kinda figured they were two different beasts trying to eat the same thing in an way.

Mr_Rose

Helpless Rock wrote: »

It it kind of redundant of me me be running AVG-Free and Avast at the same time? AVG seems to work better as a daily-ish scanner, but Avast I have had actually pop up a warning saying "Hey, warning, don't click that." (albeit a few times when there actually was nothing) that reassures me. I kinda figured they were two different beasts trying to eat the same thing in an way.

Less redundant and more counter-productive. I've never seen two different anti-virus programs play nicely together, since they will each be trying to block what the other is doing, namely touching files in their sensitive places...

Dírhael

Sarathai wrote: »

NOD32 is the best paid-for antivirus. Kaspersky is excellent at cleaning up an already infected machine, but NOD32 is better at keeping you from getting infected in the first place and has less impact on boot times. Neither has a significant impact on performance once Windows has loaded. Either way, make sure you get the antivirus and not the security suite. Comodo makes a better firewall than either of the two for free.

If you're not willing to pay, Avast! and Avira are both decent choices. Avira seemed more lightweight when I was using it and it catches more threats, but it has two major caveats. It has a very high rate of false positives; identifying files as malware when they are perfectly harmless. You also do have to jump thru some hoops to disable its nag screen telling you to buy the paid version, as Dìrhael has already mentioned.

Actually, the last year or two the paid version of Avira have been at the very top of AV's when it comes to detection (if one is to believe the tests done out there by the better testing labs). The false positives used to be a problem in the past, but that's not really the case any more.

I previously used to use NOD32, but since they released version 3 it was causing more problems than it solved. I stuck with it [v3] for a year or so, but finally had to abandon it. The frequent long-lasting CPU spikes was to much of a problem, and they still haven't managed to completely solve it. It is also insanely slow at scanning compressed executables (UPX at least), which didn't really help...though to be fair, that's not a new problem with NOD32 seeing as the same could be observed with 2.x.

I would use their 30-day trial first if considering purchasing it, because the CPU problem does not effect everyone but if it does it's nice to know before commiting and while the problems with compressed exe's probably always will be there it's certainly not something most would get problems from. If they ever get it back to the stability and performance of their 2.7 version I probably would switch back without thinking twice though, provided that they could offer better protection than Avira of course.

Mangaroo

Dìrhael wrote: »

You can disable that notifier, just not from within the program itself...and here's how you do it

Personally, I'm using (and have for the last couple of years) the premium version of Avira. It hardly uses any resources, it's by far one of the best at detecting malware and it doesn't get in my way unlike certain other AV tools.

Thanks so much! I'll give that a try today!

ben0207

http://www.tipsfor.us/2007/08/15/make-avira-antivir-free-edition-more-usable/

Guide to making Avira more useable.


Stay the hell away from AVG.

Viscountalpha

Dìrhael wrote: »

Sarathai wrote: »

NOD32 is the best paid-for antivirus. Kaspersky is excellent at cleaning up an already infected machine, but NOD32 is better at keeping you from getting infected in the first place and has less impact on boot times. Neither has a significant impact on performance once Windows has loaded. Either way, make sure you get the antivirus and not the security suite. Comodo makes a better firewall than either of the two for free.

If you're not willing to pay, Avast! and Avira are both decent choices. Avira seemed more lightweight when I was using it and it catches more threats, but it has two major caveats. It has a very high rate of false positives; identifying files as malware when they are perfectly harmless. You also do have to jump thru some hoops to disable its nag screen telling you to buy the paid version, as Dìrhael has already mentioned.

Actually, the last year or two the paid version of Avira have been at the very top of AV's when it comes to detection (if one is to believe the tests done out there by the better testing labs). The false positives used to be a problem in the past, but that's not really the case any more.

I previously used to use NOD32, but since they released version 3 it was causing more problems than it solved. I stuck with it [v3] for a year or so, but finally had to abandon it. The frequent long-lasting CPU spikes was to much of a problem, and they still haven't managed to completely solve it. It is also insanely slow at scanning compressed executables (UPX at least), which didn't really help...though to be fair, that's not a new problem with NOD32 seeing as the same could be observed with 2.x.

I would use their 30-day trial first if considering purchasing it, because the CPU problem does not effect everyone but if it does it's nice to know before commiting and while the problems with compressed exe's probably always will be there it's certainly not something most would get problems from. If they ever get it back to the stability and performance of their 2.7 version I probably would switch back without thinking twice though, provided that they could offer better protection than Avira of course.

I'm still using 2.7 and I'm fine with it. I'll have to see what avira is like though.