Re: PC antivirus software

On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:57:40 -0400, Neon John <no@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:46:41 -0500, Elliot Richmond
I, along with others, use AVG free. It has worked flawlessly. Since I
do exchange files with clients, students, and others, I keep it
running and update daily. It has found and sequestered viruses for me.

My geekiest friends recommend Avast.

In the past I've been a very happy user of AVG. It was a nice lightweight
scanner that didn't slow things too much and did its disk scan thing in about
4 hours at night. Then along came Version 8. I think that Microsh*t
infiltrated the company because Version 8 looks just like something that would
come out of Redmond. Bloated, slow, a resource hog and obnoxious. I should
have known something was amiss when I saw that a prerequisite to Version 8 was
to install XP SP2. I've done just fine without SP2 for years..

Against my better judgment and after cloning my drive, I downloaded SP2 and
installed it which immediately slowed everything down by about a third. Then
I downloaded V8 and installed it. Gaaaaaa! Where did all my memory and CPU
speed go? That little 4 hour scan now takes more than 24 hours so it only gets
run once a week. I had to turn off everything except the file system scan to
get anything to work even a fraction as fast as before.

Fortunately I had that disk clone to fall back on so a few days ago I cloned
my drive BACK to where it was before these clowns got ahold of it.

Too bad, AVG. Ya had to go and drink the Redmond Kool-Aid. I liked your
company and your product. I had clients buy it. No more. Too bad.

Based on your comment, Elliot, I'm currently downloading Avast free after
fighting with one of the more poorly organized web sites I've seen in awhile.
We'll see how it does.

Meanwhile, there's a nice little scanner that comes with
http://www.portableapps.com called ClamWin. It's an open-source freebie. It
simply scans the disk or file(s). It doesn't embed its claws into the OS or
applications so it doesn't soak up any resources. It is run either manually or
from Winders Scheduler so it's not sitting in memory all the time soaking up
resources. I like that.

Unless I'm REAL impressed with Avast, ClamWin will be what I go with
permanently. The only serious deficiency that I've found so far is that it
doesn't install a shell extension that would let me right-click on a file and
choose to scan it. That's my main use of anti-virus software anyway -
checking things that I download. Maybe in the next release.

BTW, even though PortableApps is designed to be installed on a thumb drive and
not leave any tracks on the hard drive, it's a handy collection of software to
have installed on the desktop. I like the KeePass password manager a bit
better than PassWordSafe, my previous manager.

Another program, WinDirStat does what BigFile used to do on DOS - scans the
disk and compiles a list of files sorted by size. It helps you find out why
your disk free space is leaking away. Amazing what trash some apps leave
behind.

John

The problem with AVG 8 is the part that automatically scans all the
links for each web page you are looking at. If you turn off the link
scanner the rest runs fine.


The Link Scanner is a known problem. It scans every link on every web
page you go to resulting in a much slower machine and very high
traffic. If you turn off the link scanner the rest runs fine.

nothermark
.

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