Comments | andrewwilde: Virus & Malware protection

andrewwilde

Virus & Malware protection - what would you advise using?

Jan 03, 2011 12:40

Again, as per last post, I'm setting up the new netbook. Having had to replace the laptop... As before, I'm after people's opinions as to what's good, and what's not:

Poll Virus & Malware ProtectionIf you've got any others you'd advise using, please feel free to let me know by comments ( Read more... )

Comments 7

hairyears January 3 2011, 13:32:50 UTC

None of the reviews mention the resources required to run these AV packages, while updating, scanning, or running in the background and monitoring the computer's day-to-day activity ( ... )

andrewwilde January 3 2011, 22:29:05 UTC

I agree completely - performance is a big issue. Especially on a netbook - it's at least dual core (1.8 GHz) but with only 1Gb RAM (soon to be a less-than-massive 2Gb DDR3) it's going to be sensitive to the AV hogging it all... I will mainly scan manually, when it's convenient, but updating and background CPU & RAM use matters to me... Any suggestions what I should be using?

(I currently have Norton Netbook Edition on it's 60 day trial, which doesn't seem too bad on performance, but I have no idea how effective it is at stopping infections...)

hairyears January 4 2011, 11:41:09 UTC

I have no good suggestions: I'm following this post in the hope of finding an AV package which works on - and allows to work my elderly Vaio, which functions as a perfectly acceptable netbook.

isquiesque January 3 2011, 14:47:08 UTC

My (admittedly dated) impression of McAfee is that it, in and of itself, is a memory-stealing, performance-reducing, cluttering piece of malware that will eventually slow your system to a stone. Norton's nag used to really annoy me, but now that I think of it I now have it at work and it runs pretty silently and such, so maybe I shouldn't be so averse to paying for it. I've used AVG free for years. I've (knock on wood) never gotten anything that kept the computer from running, and never had to deal with them as a company, though I do find it's damn annoying when you upgrade because you have to run a bit of a gauntlet to find the free version. All that said, I'm one of those people who reformats my drives and reinstalls everything whenever I get a bit unhappy and have no compunction about doing so, so if you're looking for long-term sailing, I might not be the person to whom you should listen. Just curious: why did you buy a new system when you could have saved the old one through a reformat?

isquiesque January 3 2011, 14:53:09 UTC

Heh - now that I've commented, I've read what hairyears said, and it looks like I sort of echoed the same sentiments. To be clear: I run the most basic AVG-Free, I pay for nothing from them, and take other basic safeguards, such as generally not allowing scripts to run on web pages (No Script is a great add-on for FireFox), not hitting really questionable sites (though that can be difficult to gauge), and, in general, keeping things backed up so that if I have to reformat it's No Big Deal. We lost one of our systems in December to a non-bootable drive and although we were offline until I had the time off from work to sort it out, I ultimately had the system back up in 24 hours once I got 'round to it, for free, without dealing with anyone on a tech support line. The collateral benefit is that it's now on a new OS and super shiny lovely.

andrewwilde January 3 2011, 22:38:02 UTC

I have the same impression of McAfee - memory & CPU heavy, but my experience is a long way out of date (last used about 6-8 years ago...)
I've never had the pleasure of Norton, but I've heard it's not that effective - again, dated comments from friends & colleagues though.
I've used AVG for many years now, some paid and some free, and not had issues. Until the latest lot: now I would err on the side of the free version, and assume there's no customer service, as the paid version uses the same engine and the customer service is pants and near-useless anyway...

However, I have little idea which other ones give good protection for not much system resource drain.

Just installed Firefox, so that No Script advice is useful - thanks!

andrewwilde January 3 2011, 22:45:34 UTC

why did you buy a new system when you could have saved the old one through a reformat
I needed to get a netbook for next year anyway - I travel quite a bit, and the laptop was big & heavy & inconvenient on a motorbike, and too big for easy use on the train or on a plane...

Also, my data was spread to the four winds, not consolidated, nor archived properly: so a new install on the old machine would have left me missing a lot. A new machine means I can take my time getting it how I need it for August onwards, not loose any data, and have a more convenient (though slower) system. As I use the machine for work, I can't afford to be without it for any length of time... AVG clearly weren't going to get it working in a reasonable timescale, so a new machine it had to be...