what anti-virus?

[ps2/bikevision]

my anti-virus is expired and im looking for a new one. what do you guys use, right now im using panada but dont really care for it. i used to have CA or something like that. i got it free with my internet service when i lived in michigan. it was a really good one. i never had a problem and it came with spy-ware blocker too.

nortin is out. i know several people that have lost there whole system with it.

[Brian Moffet]

I use McAfee  at home on my Windows machines.   Seems to work well enough, though they keep trying to sell me more features.

I have an Silicon Graphics machine I can sell you, there are no viruses for it!  ;D

1.5 cents worth.

Brian

[YellowJacket!]

Mcafee and symantec are major resource hogs and the "Suites" will drag even a well equipped system down to a crawl.  Kinda like having dirty carbs on your Vision.
I have switched most of my clients to AVG (Has both free antispyware and antivirus) or Avast anti virus.

www.free.grisoft.com for avg

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html   for Avast

David

[Lucky]

i'll second AVG, great quiet background program, although latley i've noticed failures in the auto update connections...

[YellowJacket!]

i'll second AVG, great quiet background program, although latley i've noticed failures in the auto update connections...

A lot of people are switching to AVG.  Servers may be bogging down when lots of pc's try to update all at once.

As far as mem requirements it is great.  Takes up very little RAM and CPU cycles.
My pc has 4 HDD's 2 80 gig, 1 160 gig external and 1 80 gig external.  Full scan takes about 2 hours and drives are mostly full.
AVG and Avast work with Vista too,

Just worked on a customers laptop.  A new Dell with core duo and 1 gig of ram.  It took longer than 5 minutes to boot.  and once booted, it would stay at 100% CPU utilization.  I thought it was spyware, but removing the HDD and scanning turned up nothing.  Scanning while in the laptop was painfully slow and had to reboot into safe mode to be able to do it.
SVChost was one of the culprits at 80%cpu and 512mb ram useage.  Mcafee services was also pegged.  Removed Mcafee which required 4 reboots to do and cpu utilization was finally down to less than 10% and boot time was 2 mins (winxp Pro).
I installed AVG (both anti spyware and antivirus) and had no change in CPU utilization and RAM useage.  One happy customer that wanted to pay me more than my normal $50.00hr fee.  ;D

David

[inanecathode]

3rd or 4th AVG, works for me!

[ps2/bikevision]

avg downloaded and scanning now. thanks alot guys. dont know what i would do without the rov.

[h2olawyer]

I must be in the minority.  Norton has always worked well for me.  No slowdowns or resource hogging.  However, the subscription on my desktop has expired.  Think I'll give AVG a try.  Thanks for the info, Dave.

H₂O

[kiawrench]

lol,,little known tidbit - th emajority of th eviruses and spyware that slows you down, are not seen or resolved by norton or mcaffee!
both of th eose systems are written and overseen here in th estates, and for some reason, both seem to skip right over some viruses.
AVG is done in several counries, and then assembled into one working unit, and once you switch you will see a handful of "new viruses "being found right away- when in reality ,they were there all along.   best bet avg free edition anti virus, and free spyware program, paired with a good schedule period(i use weekly, 3 am on mondays) and it will keep you fast ,and clean.

[ithinkitsbroke]

AVG Free Edition for the win!

[Sable]

Just to throw in my $.02.... I use Clam Anti-Virus for both my Linux box (primary machine) and for my windows machine (windows version is called ClamWin). Like AVG, it is free, but I have had much better luck with Clam than I did with AVG.

~John

[BREWSKI]

I have two anti spyware systems in my computer. "ad ware"and "spybot search and destroy" they are both free an can be downloaded from the internet.Make sure that you run them every couple of days and check for updates.

[Coil Coyle]

I must be in the minority.  Norton has always worked well for me.  No slowdowns or resource hogging.  However, the subscription on my desktop has expired.  Think I'll give AVG a try.  Thanks for the info, Dave.

H₂O

H2O,
The current Symantec Norton suite does updates of the parental control list whenever you boot even when the feature is disabled. I switched to CA free but it wants re registering monthly, I'm going to try AVG at home when we swap providers to Oregon.

Thanks, Dave.
;)
Coil

[Coil Coyle]

I have two anti spyware systems in my computer. "ad ware"and "spybot search and destroy" they are both free an can be downloaded from the internet.Make sure that you run them every couple of days and check for updates.

Brewski and me agree on this one! I like the report the first time you run it :o :o :o :o :o

;)
Coil

[h2olawyer]

Norton may update stuff upon booting up, but my laptop just runs a tad slow for about a minute after booting.  Total time - maybe 90 seconds.  It may just be that the computer was new in December, has an AMD Turion64x2 processor and 1gig of RAM.  It's a fairly fast machine.  My desktop, with a 2.6 P4 & 1 gig of RAM takes a little longer to boot, but it runs more stuff.  The Norton that was on it just expired.  My ISP offers free McAfee security software so I went that route this time.  The parental controls are a separate part of the suite & I didn't install those.  Now that computer boots a little quicker & is up to full speed faster as well.

I had spybot installed for about 6 hours once - it interfered with nearly everything & slowed my desktop down by at least 50%.  Uninstalled it & the machine sped right back up.  I do use ad-aware, though.  That works well.

H₂O

[YellowJacket!]

Thats odd about spybot.  Unless, you chose the option for the "resident program" called teatimer.  Teatimer is a small program that pretty much asks for your approval/disapproval of almost anything you do on your pc.  Its a real PITA at first but pays off once it learns how you do things.  If you choose one wrong thing though and its katie bar the door from there on out.

David

[Aelwulf]

AVG Free Edition here as well.  Brain-fartin' the name of my Spyware program at the moment, use ZoneAlarm for a firewall.

[YellowJacket!]

Zone alarm is good but one of its components "zlclient" can for no apparent reason become a major resource hog.  It also links to one of the generic "svchost" files and can drag a decent system down in a heartbeat.  ZL released a fix a while back though.  Also zonealarm has a nasty tendency of creating huge log files and does not clean them up.  I had removed ZL from one of my laptops and ended up deleting over 1.5 GIGS of log files!

David

[Aelwulf]

Yeah, I think I have the logs turned off for the most part.  The other one I think does run on occasion but 90% of the time doesn't affect things all that much.  I have a halfway decent system (was a good gaming rig 2-3 years ago) so compared to a lot of folks it might make it easier on mine too. *shrug*