Jay’s Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-02

2 Responses to “Jay’s Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-02”

1. BlueRaja
   August 8th, 2009 at 8:24 pm

   AVG is the only other decent free antivirus, and its detection rate is better than Avast, but in terms of resource-hogging it’s almost as bad as Norton and Mcafee (which both have even better detection rates, but aren’t free, and are notorious resource hogs).

   The resource usage of Nod32 is second only to Avast, and it has a much better detection rate. Most tech geeks consider Nod32 to be the best antivirus, but it’s not free.

2. Jay Valens
   August 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

   I wasn’t aware that AVG had a free on-access virus scanner - I recall I had a license (for 2 servers) for a couple years but didn’t look into any free options from AVG.

   The thing I didn’t like about AVG is that it seemed to not be as effective at detecting the most recent malware.

   Here’s what I found so far of all the AV products I’ve used:

   Norton/Symantec:
   - Constantly messes up system configurations, lots of problems interfering with normal system operation. Licensing too expensive, not even as effective as a lot of other options out there which are free.

   AVG:
   - Similar to Norton/Symantec but at least more affordable (and apparently now I’m learning there is a free AVG option).

   Avast:
   - Excellent on-access and system scanner, database updates almost daily. Never had a problem with system configurations or conflicts. The main problem is that when used in unison with Firefox (meaning, plainly, when using Firefox while the Avast on-access scanner is running), 5-10% of web sites suffer serious perceived performance issues for no apparent reason. It’s not the problem with those sites, but in the way Avast is handling those sites being processed by Firefox. Avast has known about this for nearly 2 years and never done anything about it.

   PrevX:
   This software has saved my system TWICE from really bad malware and was very effective at eradicating the issues totally, and seems to play reasonably well on the system (and it has an excellent in-memory scanner compared to other AV options). However, my most recent issue in July went totally past PrevX as well as Avast, and it took me 3-4 days to do a cleanup. I also noticed that the most recent version of PrevX does not play well with other scanners resident on the system and decided to not run it anymore in favor of a Avast put on full throttle, plus using the NoScript plugin with Firefox.

   Malwarebytes:
   Excellent malware scanner. I don’t use their on-access upgrade but as an offline file scanner, this one has caught stuff that none of the others have, so it’s a good weekly offline scanner.

   Ad-Aware:
   These days its pretty useless and doesn’t have any features or benefits that can’t already be found integrated into other free AV scanners, even basic ones.

   I’m familiar with other software but haven’t taken the time to try much else out. All the above has suited me pretty well at one time or another. My current laptop has:

   - Avast as the on-access scanner, running at highest sensitivity.
   - Malwarebytes as a backup scanner I will run at least on a weekly basis.
   - PrevX installed (but not running) in case I might need to do an in-memory scan every once in a while.
   - Firefox with the NoScript plugin installed - sometimes a pain to have it “learn” what sites & settings are OK but definitely a good combo for browsing safely.

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