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There is so very much more to be
concerned with:
Size of memory footprint
Scan speed
Scheduled scanning ability
Plugs into email applications
How it behaves with other applications
How easy it is to use.
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At work we run Symantec corporate
edition, and I actually need to disable it to burn a DVD rather than
a coaster (and I don't run on old or low-end hardware). At home,
AntiVir chugs away without making a nuisance of itself or reducing
all disc access to a crawl. It also doesn't install six services,
two autoruns, and a handful of TCP/IP stack hijacks, which Symantec
does.
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AVG
Free Edition |
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- AVG is more user friendly,
does have a scheduled scan feature that Avast does not seem
to have. It does not seem to have a plug-in for IM and p2p
networks.
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So you don't drive a car with
airbags and anti-breaking system because it increases your car's
weight, therefore slows it down and you are a save driver???
Get real, even if you are without a fault, someone else may make a
mistake and it will hit you. Someone else's computer gets infected
and sends you an e-mail (with known sender) or a website gets hacked
and has some malicious code on it.
My AntiVir consumes about 0% of processing power and I am willing to
give up some main memory to be on the save side and have a little
bit of protection
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Avast
Home Edition |
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Avast has an excellent feature that nobody else has,
which is the ability to scan in command line mode on reboot before
major services load, similar to running chkdsk. This enables you to
kill a lot of things that fire up as a windows service. They get a
gold star for this.
-
I was thinking about using a scheduled task to run a
full system scan via the command line interface every couple of
days.
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AVAST also has plugins for about a dozen IM and p2p
services. This is excellent for a number of reasons.
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On the flip side, once you install a better skin for
aVast it becomes a great deal easier to navigate. That is probably
my biggest peeve with avast apart from the in-ability to schedule
scans at regular intervals. Though I actually haven't found a virus
that wasn't caught by the active scans.
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Similarly, if it updates the program online, it's a
bit overly happy to tell you every last thing about the process in a
window that seems to sit on top of everything else. All that in
addition to the annoying balloons XP SP2 keeps giving you.
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Clamwin
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If you add Winpooch
[winpooch.free.fr] to ClamWin, it becomes realtime. You also get
antispyware, etc. from WinPooch. It's a good combo, but it can
intimidate some users. I usually recommend ESET's for-pay NOD32 over
everything.
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Ultimate Boot CD
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The best way I've found to clean an already infected PC is to go to
www.ubcd4win.com and download and build an Ultimate Boot CD for
Windows.
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This way, you boot from the CD, with the OS offline. Then you can
update and use the ubcd4win built in antivirus and antispyware utils
to clean your system. This has worked every time for us.
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