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Topic: Anti-virus woes (Read 6277 times) previous topic - next topic
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Anti-virus woes

so, my 1 year subscription for NAV2002 is finally up and it harasses me DAILY to renew. i emailed them to try to find out if i could disable the annoyance as i know the risks of doing so, and all they said my choices were: 1) buy a new version 2) buy a new version at our online store! 3) uninstall the software.

what exact kind of bullshit is this?

i know they're trying to run a business, but since when did they start doing this? i remember McAfee would put up a window saying that the app was seriously out of date, but nothing as intrusive as this. the computer i'm on at the moment, in fact, is running an out-of-date McAfee that pops up a window upon bootup that says "Your McAfee subscription has expired and your protection has been disabled. Your computer is NOT protected..." that pisses me off to no end and pushed me over the edge into posting about it...

so, i guess the question is, is there one out there as good as the big boys (NAV, McAfee) but not stupid and evil like them? i'd pay about $30-50 (preferrably $30, but whatever) for something decent if only for definition updates... i hear NOD32 and Kaspery a lot but don't remember what reviews had to say about them.

the posts and polls i saw on the board had some pretty obscure names. i'd like something big enough that they get updated monthly (if not more often) but, mainly whatever gets the job done that will cover my butt when i go to the occasional LAN party where some dumbasses' computer(s) will start spewing virii at all other computers on occasion. my school offers a copy of PC-Cillin (or whatever it's called now) but i'm not sure how long the licence runs... ( http://www.ppccinst.net/antivirus.cfm )

i have no problems pirating software (i'm a starving student, underpaid blah blah blah you know the excuses), but for stuff i'm going to use every day, i like to be pretty honest about that kind of stuff, but i DON'T want to be squeezed for money each and every year.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #1 –
Grisoft offers a free version of AVG antivirus which has served me well, provides updates for free, and all you need is a valid e-mail address at which to recieve the serial number for activation.
 
Here is the link to AVG Free; they provide updates for both the engine and the virus definitions, but you must manually update the program, which might be too difficult for the supremely lazy
 
I've never had a problem with it (and I actually had a virus at one time before I got around to installing it), it's "resident shield" active scan is easy to turn off,  it's Outlook Email checker works just  fine, and definitions are updated as often as two or three times a week.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #2 –
Do yourself a favor and get NOD32.  It's very fast and resource friendly, has an excellent track record (one of the best, which can't necessarily be said about some of the 'big boys'), and is non-annoying (doesn't install all kinds of firewall/'protection' BS or other things that screw around with the system).

There's some discussions about it on this board already somewhere.

Oh, and I'd prefer that there were no discussion of pirated software.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #3 –
I'm quite happy with AntiVir Personal Edition. Is free, has an auto-update feature, and there's an official support forum.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #4 –
Quote
Do yourself a favor and get NOD32.  It's very fast and resource friendly, has an excellent track record (one of the best, which can't necessarily be said about some of the 'big boys'), and is non-annoying (doesn't install all kinds of firewall/'protection' BS or other things that screw around with the system).

so you really don't like NAV/McAfee? i've never had a problem with them. Norton's Internet Security suite is kinda stupid and annoying, but at least you can eventually turn parts of it off. my dad had loads of problems getting it to work, but i never had any performance issues or stability probs related to virus scanners.

well, never had a problem until the subscription ran out...

edit: also, is there a way to get NOD32 for closer to $30? or are they the only ones that sell their product?

edit2: what happens when your software updates expire? does it just warn you that you can't update anymore? or do the program do anything nasty like disable itself completly? or should i search? >_>

Anti-virus woes

Reply #5 –
If you want to spend as little amount of money as possible and don't want to have expiration issues, give freebies a try - there are 3 very decent & free anti-viruses: Avast, AntiVir, and AVG. I haven't tried Avast, but I tried AntiVir a year ago and had some install issues on my Windows 2000 Professional (I don't know how it is now, but a year ago AntiVir was known to be not-too-stable), so I'm using AVG. The only bad thing I can say about AVG is that its resident scanner only detects viruses - it doesn't remove them - you have to launch separate module to remove a virus. That module is included in AVG installation and of course is free, so no big deal. AFAIK all these 3 AVs have automatic-updates (even every day) and all the stuff that AV programs need, and surely are bloody fast in comparison to NAV which makes your disk access bloody slow (had it, saw it). NAV is really overpraised, it's a resource hog while it doesn't have the best detection efficacy on the market. BTW, if detection efficiency is a priority for you, and you doesn't care about speed, get AntiVirenKit (it's commercial).

Anti-virus woes

Reply #6 –
Quote
and surely are bloody fast in comparison to NAV which makes your disk access bloody slow (had it, saw it). NAV is really overpraised, it's a resource hog while it doesn't have the best detection efficacy on the market. BTW, if detection efficiency is a priority for you, and you doesn't care about speed, get AntiVirenKit (it's commercial).

i never had any problems with NAV slowing the system down (well, games / demoscene graphics demos kinda twitched at a regular interval, but never thought of it before or connected it to virusscanning before) but then again i don't shuffle programs around that much... mainly just MPEG2 videos and MP3s and AVIs, nor do i cap video, plus i run a 1GB on a 2400 so not sure i'd notice performance sluggishness very much... maybe i've been lucky...?

Anti-virus woes

Reply #7 –
NOD32 is quite nice.  I used to use NAV and it was very resource hungry.  Not to mention all the things that needed to be loaded during bootup.  NOD32 has probably the best record, according to Virus Bulletin's VB 100.  If you look at the results history, NOD32 has only had 3 fails while AVG had 20, and McAfee 17.

I believe Microsoft uses NOD32 to check their binaries before releasing them for CD

Anti-virus woes

Reply #8 –
Quote
Quote
Do yourself a favor and get NOD32.  It's very fast and resource friendly, has an excellent track record (one of the best, which can't necessarily be said about some of the 'big boys'), and is non-annoying (doesn't install all kinds of firewall/'protection' BS or other things that screw around with the system).

so you really don't like NAV/McAfee? i've never had a problem with them. Norton's Internet Security suite is kinda stupid and annoying, but at least you can eventually turn parts of it off. my dad had loads of problems getting it to work, but i never had any performance issues or stability probs related to virus scanners.

well, never had a problem until the subscription ran out...

edit: also, is there a way to get NOD32 for closer to $30? or are they the only ones that sell their product?

edit2: what happens when your software updates expire? does it just warn you that you can't update anymore? or do the program do anything nasty like disable itself completly? or should i search? >_>

I hate them for the most part.  Norton and McAfee are mostly bloated crap.  They are slow, have a lot of useless features, aren't that great at protecting your system, and break things by messing with system level stuff that they shouldn't mess with.  I've had to deal with more issues on other people's machines because of these programs than I can count.

For a long time I refused to run an antivirus program actually, because most of them are either slow or problematic in some other way, but that changed when I came across NOD32.  NOD32 actually does what it's supposed to, and only that (surprise!).  It's very good at what it's supposed to do.  And it's very fast, which is almost the exception to the rule with today's programs.

I don't know details about pricing though.  And I don't know what happens when the subscription runs out, I've never had mine run out on me.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #9 –
iam also running nod for some time now, (since i started to use the machine for video editing tasks more frequently nav started to be just another annoying slow-me-computer thingy), so far no problems with nod32, and when you close the proggy it actually quits
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Anti-virus woes

Reply #10 –
How well does eTrust eZAntivirus 6 stands up against other AV tools? Many of you say NOD32 to be very efficient and a non-system hogger. When I tried that in my cousin's place, it did take up about 19M of memory (according to Windows Task Manager). I'm currently trying eZ Antivirus, and it seems damn transperent -- ~1.5M according to Task manager. And unfortunately when I'm using this I nearly got infected with 3 virii, and the eZ came out victor. Is Task manager not a proper tool to compare this way? Are there any pro comparisons made in the past? Any comments are much appreciated...

edit : The AVs are running in 'off the box'/default mode here. Did you guys make a super tweak for NOD32?

Anti-virus woes

Reply #11 –
For comparison,  the AVGserv app takes up about 1.9MB of RAM with resident shield shut off and the email scanner turned on  (for Outlook  both in and out, not Express). As rutra mentioned however, this is just the scanning utility portion.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #12 –
I have F-Prot here. It's unbloated, fast, and is only an Anti Virus, like NOD.

My subscription never expired, but if it ever expires you can download the updated virus definitions from here:
ftp://ftp.europe.f-secure.com/pub/f-prot/updates/f-prot/

I don't use the real time scanner to save resources. When I download a file that looks suspisious, I scan it alone.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #13 –
Quote
How well does eTrust eZAntivirus 6 stands up against other AV tools? Many of you say NOD32 to be very efficient and a non-system hogger. When I tried that in my cousin's place, it did take up about 19M of memory (according to Windows Task Manager). I'm currently trying eZ Antivirus, and it seems damn transperent -- ~1.5M according to Task manager. And unfortunately when I'm using this I nearly got infected with 3 virii, and the eZ came out victor. Is Task manager not a proper tool to compare this way? Are there any pro comparisons made in the past? Any comments are much appreciated...

edit : The AVs are running in 'off the box'/default mode here. Did you guys make a super tweak for NOD32?

Not sure if this is the same one you are referring to:

http://www.virusbulletin.com/vb100/archive....xml?etrust.xml

But according to Virus Bulletin, 17 passes and 10 fails.

Other AV tools:

NOD32:  27 passes, 3 fails
F-Prot:  11 passes, 7 fails
AVG:  5 passes, 20 fails
Kaspersky: 22 passes, 13 fails
McAfee: 13 passes, 17 fails
BitDefender: 3 passes, 7 fails
Norton:  24 passes 6 fails

So NOD32 has the best record here.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #14 –
Don't think I'm being redundant... I'm just trying put things into proper perspective -- for myself. Do you think ~20M of system memory usage is normal? In what way NOD32 is low on sytem resources? How is this judged? On the performance of other applications when NOD is running in the background? (Transperancy?! Again?! )

From QK's info (thanks QK ), I guess eTrust cannot boast of low memory profile with such a performance. (I don't think they did anyway )

Anti-virus woes

Reply #15 –
I have gone through the review process before. While Norton is not a perfect solution, it does score the best for cleaning viruses from a file so you can recover the data. As the post above shows, Norton also has a good detection record.
I have used and like Antivir for a free to home users solution.
I am not impressed by any of the software firewalls.
Just give me a Netgear or Linksys hardware based unit any day.
For less than $100 US you can protect multiple computers, and use NAT to share the internet among them. Oh and, it is real nice that your computers are not slowed down or outright trashed like I have seen some software firewalls do. (cough cough Mcafee)
If you are a little brave, an OpenBSD based firewall is fantastic, and free.
 

Anti-virus woes

Reply #16 –
[span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%']Symantec (NAV/NIS) = thieves.[/span]

My Dell laptop came with NAV & NIS preinstalled. While NAV is hardly the best, it's not bad either. Something similar for NIS (good features like automatic network environment detection which is handy for a laptop, and ad blocking, but also very bad ones like by default blocking all windows networking and a spamfilter that has horrible performance).

I decided that NAS was decent enough that I'm willing to buy an update subscription for 1 year. I don't want a subscription for NIS, it's not good enough and I could care less about their parental controls which are the main thing thats updated.

I bought it...and found out that there was no way to use it. Apparently if you have NIS you *must* buy a full subscription, there is no way to subscribe to only NAV, or use a NAV subscription to update the NAV part, And this is, of course, not mentioned anywhere, or at least not clearly enough.

So I asked for a refund and even offered to buy the full NIS subscription (yes, I'm a patient and tolerant guy), though obviously I'm only going to pay the difference on top of what I already payed.

I got forwarded 2 times along different Symantec "not our problem, go ask these guys" departments, and in the end was not helped.

I consider this theft. I payed for a product and it never arrived.

My retribution was hacking NAS/NIS so my current subscription never expires. If Symantec ever gives me my money back I will remove the hack.

Before I used AVG Free on my desktop, but that had issues with never enabling resident shield by default, and annoying popups when it found email viruses (just delete them dammit, instead of spamming me with notifications).

Currently it's running PC-Cilin 2002, which came with the Asus motherboard. As far as I know it's a bit an average performer, which is pretty good for something that was free and doesn't require yearly subscription.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #17 –
Quote
my school offers a copy of PC-Cillin (or whatever it's called now) but i'm not sure how long the licence runs... ( http://www.ppccinst.net/antivirus.cfm )

PC-Cilin 2002 doesn't expire, and the update subscription also doesn't expire.

I heard that PC-Cilin 2003 or 2004 does expire update subscriptions.

If you can get it cheaply or for free from your school then it will do the job well enough.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #18 –
Quote
My retribution was hacking NAS/NIS so my current subscription never expires. If Symantec ever gives me my money back I will remove the hack.

plenty of these things are available on the net.. i'm surprised to hear you hacked that yourself. you could have saved time and effort

norton is garbage anyway. such a bloated piece of crap, i won't install it. i've been using the free edition of bitdefender for a while and so far so good. i don't think it has a "resident shield" that protects you all the time, including emails (you need to upgrade to the standard or professional version for this feature to work) but that doesn't bother me. i never open any attachments anyway without saving and scanning them first.
Be healthy, be kind, grow rich and prosper

Anti-virus woes

Reply #19 –
Now there's been said many good things about NOD32 in this thread. I thought about giving it a try a while ago, but a review article in C'T (the only German all-purpose Computer mag you can take seriously) stopped me. The article is from january 2004 (#03), and summarizes like this:
  + Fastest tested scanner
  + Good In-The-Wild-Protection
  - Bad archive support
  - Bad heuristics
  - eMail scanner scans only MIME-enoded attachments, not UUencoded

There was no single program that really was ahead of the pack in the test. If you folks are interested, I can post some more details about recognition rates and stuff.

I know but since I also know you shouldn't take computer mags religiously  - what are your opinions about the mentioned problems?

Anti-virus woes

Reply #20 –
I just wanted to be clear on some issues;

Nod32 seems to be highly praised, does it have automatic updates and does it do e-mail scanning? since it seem most of the virus floating around come in that way at the moment.

For the free ones; AVG & AntiVir
Also do they have automatic updates and email scanning? How do these compare with NOD & NAV?

I usually install NAV2003 (Not the even worse 2004 version) on other peoples computers since I consider a comprimise between decent detection and ease-of-use. But I am always badgered 1 year later when the subscription runs out and these people are wondering why they have to pay every year and why it doesn't protect from all the crap that fills up their computer when they install kazzaa, etc, etc (sorry its been a bad day).

So I would like to find something that I can install on peoples computer that is free and that hopefully has autoupdate and email scanning and that will not be too complicated to use. A lot to ask I know

Anti-virus woes

Reply #21 –
Quote
I just wanted to be clear on some issues;

Nod32 seems to be highly praised, does it have automatic updates and does it do e-mail scanning?

Yes. Automatic updates are almost daily, and it has captured all e-mail viruses so far. I have been using it now for about 6 months and i'm very pleased with the results.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #22 –
If i'm not wrong, NOD32 is not a freeware

Get Grisoft's AVG6, its 100% free
one/two features is reserved for the paid version, other than that u have full control on that software
The good news is Grisoft passes virus bulletin 100%

Avast is also another free antivirus
avast failed in virus bulletin 100%

from download.com
Kaspersky antivirus is also an excellent antivirus
check out the user's reviews

pretty old test, have a look at the result

http://www.av-test.org/online/sites/os03.p...=0&test=2002-01

Anti-virus woes

Reply #23 –
Kaspersky is definetely out as far as usable scanners go.

I found it to be impossible to install VNC while it's running. It knows that it's "riskware-thats-not-really-a-virus", yet it keeps blocking it which prevents the installer from running. If you use recommended action, it will delete the installation of this. It also deleted my FTP server.

This is simply retarded, what were they thinking?!?

PS. To be honest, going from "extended database" back to the "standard database" resolves issues like this. Still I think this behaviour is unwanted, but I'm no longer so negative towards it since it's not the default behaviour.

Anti-virus woes

Reply #24 –
I tested NOD32 as well, I'm slightly less positive about it than most people here:

1) It's fast but it also scans less files
2) The interface is simply bad IMHO. (I guess not so much an issue for background operation)
3) Memory footprint is not low.
4) Detection performance is, err, controversial. (good for in the wild stuff, much less so for others)

Overall I think I like Kaspersky more.