free quality anti-virus program?

astroworpastroworp Northridge, CA
edited January 2004 in Science & Tech
so i've been using avg by grisoft for quite some time, but as of late it has been heading south and i was wondering what, if any, free anti-virus programs you all use that you think are good? what would you recommend?

Comments

  • edcentricedcentric near Milwaukee, Wisconsin Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    I haven't found any better.
    AVG has done the job for me.
  • CaffeineMeCaffeineMe Cedar Rapids, IA
    edited January 2004
    What's Grisoft doing or not doing for/to you? I've been using it for more than a year now, love the autoupdate feature, and it's been great!
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Of the frees, avg is good. But, what you get by buying is two things really. First, the pay-for customers have vendors with more folks that get down into taking viruses apart on boxes dedicated to just that, so they get more virus defs out sooner than the ones that are free. Thus, for boxes I consider critical I use paid for software for AV-- especially if those boxes pick up email either from a server that does not virus scan email or from a non-Windows box, or accept forwards from a server that does not email scan.

    Symantec has about a hundred boxes used just for analyzing viruses. They accept virus submissions, and those submissions go to a smaller set of dedicated (and very hardened)boxes--they also get automated submissions from the appliances they now sell, and thus can know a new virus is out there faster if it is released on NA continent as most of their big customers are North American Enterprise firms in the area of big cusotmers. They can get a virus that is hitting big out to their customers, with a fixer if needed, inside of 36 hours from first virus submission-- Enterprise customers first, and then retail customers. They get submissions from othre vendors, and other vendors get submissions from them (virus and email source only, to specific email addresses that go to hardened virus submission boxes). The folks that do paid work as far as AV also test their software with ICSA and other AV test files regularly (and more often than non-paid AV software pubs normally do), and adjust the program itself more often to adjust heuristics of what is dangerous as to action patterns of malware on a box.

    So, if you have one box, pick up or receive email on it, do not backup often and are not used to backup recovery, I would say these days that you need to grab ICSA files and test your free software every quarter or more often (MONTHLY would be best). When it fails, grab not just new definitions but also new versions of the program itself, and tell the veondor what ICSA failures occured. Feedback couched in reasonable and even language is important to the free AV software vendors, just as it is for all open source sopftware dev-- they use the free users as feedback for frequency to know what kinds of things to woprk on first with more limited manpower and number of machines used to analyze and literally take apart viruses. More specific feedback is better.

    Some ISPs do virus scan these days, and knowing your ISP scans viruses is more likley to make free AV software use safer-- it will be a abckup for older virus detection, while your ISP is squashing newer ones. Those that scan email with F-Protect, McAfee dedicated direct links, Symantec security boxes, or Trend Micro or Computer Associates enterprise level AV are the best adn if you get a chance to subscribe at a three dollar a month (USD) premium for AV, that will be equal to your pure paid AV software costs in the long run(this does not include recovery costs or backup costs).

    John-- whose business box is an XP box that gets no email AT ALL because of what I do, runs NAV locally, and also has an ISP that now virus scans religiously all email and hits 90%+ of the viruses with killing AV software just by scanning email. I accept a 12 hour email lag from Comcast as they DO have to have time to scan a large volume of email and are also using SpamAssassin to cull spamware emails (and very good spam tools can help rule out some email viruses by rules and aggressiveness).
  • astroworpastroworp Northridge, CA
    edited January 2004
    basically, the auto-updater never works correctly so i have to manually update, and even then it doesn't work correctly. it's just not as solid as it was for me a year ago. i guess i'll just have to play around with it some more.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    It sounds like you need to do a complete uninstall, including all registry keys, and a reinstall. That's what I needed to do on a copy of NAV that didn't autoupdate properly.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited January 2004
    ive also never heard of anything better than avg - fix what you got!
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    I don't like AVG as it has basically NO options at all, you can't even turn it off, but as it is the only Free AV that I know of, I don't see any other options.
  • astroworpastroworp Northridge, CA
    edited January 2004
    good call on the uninstall, i'll try that

    thanks!
  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Enverex wrote:
    I don't like AVG as it has basically NO options at all, you can't even turn it off, but as it is the only Free AV that I know of, I don't see any other options.

    Avast is free for home use.
  • astroworpastroworp Northridge, CA
    edited January 2004
    avast seems like it'll be cool, thanks for the referral.
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