Virus scanners

[Cpl Carrot]

Which, in your humble opinions is the the better virus scanner. Norton, McAfee or some other.

Thanks in advance

Cpl Carrot

[Tanks a Lot]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Cpl Carrot:

Which, in your humble opinions is the the better virus scanner. Norton, McAfee or some other.

Thanks in advance

Cpl Carrot<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Here's a good one for free.

AVG Anti-Virus

[Mal Elder]

I'm a firm believer that AV causes more problems then it solves. When I worked for MS support, at least half of our issues came about because of AV running in the background. It's intensive in the way it works (it has to be), thereby killing performance of your computer. http://housecall.antivirus.com and http://security.symantec.com both offer free online scanners. If you're nervous about virii, I'd keep the constantly running software off the machine and just hit these sites once a week. And they're free (: If you're on a slow connection, just start it before you bed down for the beginning. In my experience, the Symantec site is a little more thorough, but slower.

[MajorH TacOps Developer]

Zone Alarm.

Norton and MacAfee scatter garbage all over your computer and are difficult to cleanly uninstall. Both companies seem to have the attitude that your PC belongs to them once you install their product .

[Viceroy]

MajorH,

I have ZA and Norton's on my W98 computer. Are you saying that ZA is all I need protectionwise and that it's better than Norton's? :confused:

[BeWary]

Zone Alarm isn't a virus scanner, is it? I thought it was just a firewall. Of course, a firewall can help prevent people from planting viruses and/or trojan horses on your system.

I didn't even use a virus scanner on my old machine for about 2-3 years. Never had a virus. I just be careful about what I download, and I never run app's sent to me unless I'm sure they're safe.

The best virus scanner is your common sense, in my humble opinion.

On that note, I do use PC-Cillin on my new machine since it came free with my motherboard software. It runs fine and hasn't conflicted with any software yet. It's also pretty cheap to keep updated (less than $10 a year I think).

If I were you I'd probably just use one of those online scanners if I ever had a file I was suspicious of.

BeWary

[MajorH TacOps Developer]

>I have ZA and Norton's on my W98 computer. Are you saying that ZA is all I

>need protectionwise and that it's better than Norton's?

I should never do email before my fourth cup of coffee . The original questions was about virus scanners and I misread it as asking about firewalls.

I now use the latest version of MacAfee for virus scanning. I chose it based on a couple of days of Internet research. I ran it on all of the PCs that I use for development and found no viruses. I then ran it on my son's recently retired college PC and found dozens .

However I stand by my earlier comment about MacAfee heavily polluting your system and hard disk. I do not run it all the time. I only install it once a month to do a check of all my PCs and then I remove it. Before installing it I do a system save so that I can also do a system restore immediately after I uninstal MacAfee.

[BeWary]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by MajorH:

>I only install it once a month to do a check of all my PCs and then I remove it. Before installing it I do a system save so that I can also do a system restore immediately after I uninstal MacAfee.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's probably a bit much. All you should need to do is disable it. If you can't do this through the program menus, go to Start->Run and type "msconfig" (w/out the quotes of course). There's a tab where you can select what runs at startup and what doesn't. This is a great way to control what Windows runs in the background. I check it regularly, especially after new software installs, as many little buggers slip into there without permission.

NOTE - msconfig only works under Win9x I think. I'm not sure of the Win2k equivalent.

BeWary