I'm actually serious. I don't like anti-virus software b/c they take too many resources and slow my machine down.
what??? There's absolutely no point in formatting every few months, lol. Chances are your HD is trying to tell you something - mainly that it's failing or you need to clean some space/defrag it. As stipendlax said, if you're machine isn't from the 1920's and was bought within the last 2-3 years, you should be able to run these programs without a big hassle. About the only thing I go without is a firewall. Good spyware and anti-virus programs are essential. Spybot interrogates me enough just to be tolerable and plus I'm behind a router anyway. Studies have shown not even the pentagon can get into my machine if I'm behind a router.
Being serious here for a moment -- is avast really that much better than AVG ? I'll swap them out if so -- never had any problems with AVG but if avast is better i'll use it.
It's not. They're all about the same and when I say "they" - I'm lumping in the paid and the free personal scanners alike. It's a virtual tie between Antivir, AVG, and Avast as the best scanners out there. No one uses Mcafee anymore, so don't bother with that one .
At the moment, yes, Avira and Avast are better than AVG. Avira's probably one of the best scanners out there and it's free, to boot. Its only negative is probably its false-positives. Here is the result of a test done in February by AV Comparitives : http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report21.pdf Virus Bulletin from September-ish : http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2008/09_02#November Check out http://www.wilderssecurity.com/ if you want to learn more.
I don't use Avast, so I'm not sure. I don't know of any conflicts, but you may want to research. I know Avira works fine with it. The only negative of Threatfire is that it doesn't have 64-bit OS support. If you want an alternative (and possibly better alternative) to Threatfire, you can also try a product called PrevX. The full version of it is not free, however.
I used ESET NOD32, Avira and Avast for the PC and notebooks. Excuse me here, what is "false-positive"?
Gotta thank you for the Avira suggestion Doc -my testimonial- A few months back, there was a thread dicussing this same topic and you mentioned it. I did further research on it and decided to give it a try. Long story short, I have a home studio and have used (i.e. downloaded) pretty much the same plugins for years. I've also used various anti-virus programs, in fact, I'm one of those people also who reformat my machine about twice a year so I would try out a different anti-virus to see how "heavy" they operated. After I installed Avira a few months back after my last reformat, and downloaded those same programs, it caught and denied trojans in pretty much all of the files. These were the same files that all of the others missed Needless to say, I've learned my lesson and after a few months of going through withdrawals and the shakes from not using my beloved plugins, I am no longer a plugin download junky.....and it's all thanks to the Doc Seriously, like I said, I did a lot of research on Avira by looking at some geek forums (some work for Microsoft) and have settled on the following: -Avira Premium (although the free version is nice also) -Threatfire -Sygate Personal Firewall -Spyware Blaster -Spybot search and Destroy AND Ad-aware -Sandboxie (definately recommend this one for people who download a lot of files) -and C-Cleaner Can anyone with knowledge let me know if this looks okay? Thanks in advance. legend215
Kaspersky Internet Security. Works beautifully, doesn't muck with my system or hog resources, and doesn't allow anything in. Requires a bit more setup and "tweaking" than the others, but well worth it. I'm using it on all my computers. Comes with a license for four PCs or laptops. Highly recommend it.
Ok, i'm going to check out avast for a while -- the spinning 'a' is a little annoying, but i'll get used to it.
