is antivir a good antivirus

[monicaa_84]

never heard about antivir on this forum is it good in catching viruses

[pvsurfer]

-{ Quote: "never heard about antivir on this forum is it good in catching viruses" }-
What's wrong with searching?...
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/search.php?searchid=447675

[bellgamin]

AntiVir Personal Edition Classic (AVPE-C) has plenty of virus signatures, & updates them at least 5 times/week. It also has strong heuristics & good cleaning/repair capabilities. AVPE-C is diligently maintained & has frequent updates to its scan engines.

Therefore, AVPE-C is a good antivirus. However, as is true for all antivirus programs, you should supplement AVPE-C with a good AntiTrojan program.

[The Hammer]

-{ Quote: "What's wrong with searching?...
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/search.php?searchid=447675" }-
Don't be like that. Clicked on your link and a screen comes up that says "Sorry no matches. Please try some different terms."

[ronjor]

Search links expire on the forums. Try antivir for a search term. :)

[The Hammer]

-{ Quote: "Search links expire on the forums. Try antivir for a search term." }-
Yes I know but maybe monicaa_84 is new or not fully aware of how to use the forum features.

[mercurie]

Thanks Ronjor, I did not know that. Hammer I think Ronjor was just being helpful, but I do agree with you and always resist that bad urge to snap back with a rude reply. We always want to make a Guest with a serious question a welcome guest now don't we. ;)

I currently use AntiViri and like it fine. That would be until I decide what else I want to purchase. I run BoClean trojan protection along side. Bellgamin has given you good advice. ;)

[I who know nothing]

I installed AntiVir on my sisters pc because she didnt want to buy one but when I went back a few months later and ran a full system on demand scan it found lots of malware on her pc including some inside archives which it couldnt clean. I have since installed AVG on her pc and hope it does better. I advised her to buy KAV 5.

[TopperID]

-{ Quote: "I went back a few months later and ran a full system on demand scan it found lots of malware on her pc " }-
That means it is doing its job!

-{ Quote: "including some inside archives which it couldnt clean." }-
Neither the KAV Guard nor AntiVir will scan within archives realtime, but both will do so with the demand scanner; I also doubt if KAV can repair within archives, that is the nature of archives.

-{ Quote: "I have since installed AVG on her pc and hope it does better." }-
I doubt that it will even do as well as AntiVir.

[trickyricky]

-{ Quote: "That means it is doing its job!
" }-

Indeed. To draw an analogy, fitting the very best brakes to your car will never help you avoid collisions unless you also decide to drive more safely.

ALL security software needs help from the user to do its job.

[The Hammer]

-{ Quote: "I installed AntiVir on my sisters pc because she didnt want to buy one but when I went back a few months later and ran a full system on demand scan it found lots of malware on her pc including some inside archives which it couldnt clean. I have since installed AVG on her pc and hope it does better. I advised her to buy KAV 5." }-
If this had happened on your machine that would be one thing. But how dilligent was Sis in updating definitions and running regular scans?

[I who know nothing]

Your right about not cleaning infected archives until you extract the archive and delete viruses from extracted files. Maybe some of the malware on her pc was due to regular update failure because of slow and large AntiVir dialup updates , hopefully smaller and faster incremental updates from AVG will be more suitable.

[tiagozt]

I think Antivir is a very good program, BUT update size is nonsense (!!!).

[tiagozt]

-{ Quote: "I installed AntiVir on my sisters pc because she didnt want to buy one but when I went back a few months later and ran a full system on demand scan it found lots of malware on her pc including some inside archives which it couldnt clean. I have since installed AVG on her pc and hope it does better. I advised her to buy KAV 5." }-

I think it's impossible...

AVG will never be better than Antivir in detection...

[waters]

Avg has let me down,antivir is far better.I have tried loads of antivirus and its up there with the best.

[Firecat]

AntiVir is a good AV as far as malware detection is concerned. Much better than AVG IMO. :)

[abhi_mittal]

What are the pros and cons of Antivir against Avast?

Which is the lighter on on the system

Abhishek

[abhi_mittal]

I want the lightest and an effective FREE AV for my notebook PC.

[abhi_mittal]

Cmon guys, advise me! :-\

[.....]

Hi Abhishek,

May i reccomend you try both avast and antivir (both are free - you have nothing to lose) and you see which you like better.

IMO, both are fine products.

Antivir prolly has the better heuristics (a method of finding unknown malware threats) and a larger signiture database. However, its GUI isn't the easiest to use and the updates are very large (5mb+ daily), this is going to change soon BTW though, they will be making an incremental update system (only downloading the data missing instead of all the data again at every update)

Avast on the other hand features several features which antivir misses. Such as a HTTP scanner and a network IDS system.

You could always run one in realtime and the other on demand.

Hope this helps...

[abhi_mittal]

which has a better real-time protection?

[Sputnik]

-{ Quote: "I want the lightest and an effective FREE AV for my notebook PC." }-
I'll recommend you avast! over AntiVir... The AntiVir update machanism just sucks, and what's a AV without a good update?
avast! is better this way, fast little updates :) I'm sure AntiVir's scanning results will be a little better tho, but it's about compromises... Because on the other hand avast! has better unpacker then AntiVir, so just pick what you like/prefer :)

[rdsu]

The level detection is the pratical the same between AntiVir and avast!, but avast have much better updater engine, support, features, and the free version also scan spyware...
With AntiVir PEC you can't scan for spyware... :(

AntiVir is good as backup AV and for very old computers...

So, if you are looking for a free AV, try avast! Home Edition ;)

[The Hammer]

-{ Quote: "I'll recommend you avast! over AntiVir... The AntiVir update machanism just sucks, and what's a AV without a good update?
avast! is better this way, fast little updates :) I'm sure AntiVir's scanning results will be a little better tho, but it's about compromises... Because on the other hand avast! has better unpacker then AntiVir, so just pick what you like/prefer :)" }-
I have read that Avast Home Edition does not have script protection. Is this correct and if it is how important is this?

[TAP]

I've used avast! Home to protect my laptop more than 6 months, so far so good, avast! update mechanism is excellent on Wireless LAN and via GPRS.

As far as I've seen in some tests. AntiVir has slightly better detection rates at Zoo malware but I don't care about that much for Zoo, Antivir is slightly lighter than avast! on my old PC desktop but my laptop is quite fast (768 MB of RAM) so I have no reasons to use AntiVir or AVG Free.

Beside the excellent avast! update mechanism and superb support forum, the most important aspect of avast! Home for me is so-called Multi-layer real-time protection that you can choose to install what you want

- Web Shield (real-time HTTP scaner)
- URL Blocking
- Network Shield (similar to IDS)
- P2P Shield
- IM Shield
- Internet Mail (POP/SMTP/IMAP/NNTP)
...

About Script Blocking module, If I'm not mistaken if you have the fully patched system you don't have to worry about it. But I may be wrong so wait for other gurus to tell you. :)

Try avast! Home and AntiVir on your laptop and you'll know what works for you.

[Slovak]

The only drawback I have with Antivir is its lack of auto updating, other than that I think it is a fine AV product. I have tried AVG, and think it is the worst of the three freebies. Avast IMO has slowed my computers down a bit more than I would like as far as internet browsing, and email sending/receiving. My computers aren't brand new high end models, but aren't dinasours either.

[patermann]

-{ Quote: "You could always run one in realtime and the other on demand." }-
I had a bad experience with having AntiVir and another AV installed at the same time (AntiVir realtime, AVG on-demand). Because both have real-time scanners, they both installed VXDs which are loaded when Windows starts, even though the AVG realtime scanner was disabled. Once when I rebooted after an AntiVir update, my machine kept blue-screening as soon as I tried to do anything - even clicking on the Start button brought up the blue screen. I ended up using selective boot with prompts to prevent AntiVir from loading its VXDs on bootup - then the PC was stable enough for me to uninstall AntiVir. (BTW, this was on Win98SE.)

Having also tried BitDefender Free which installed 4 startup processes, without which it wouldn't even run, I have decided that, for me at least, backup scanners should only be AVs that do not require any kind of installation. That way there should be much less chance of conflicts with the main AV.

HTH

patermann

P.S. Some would say that I uninstalled the wrong AV but I had never had any problem with AVG prior to installing AntiVir, it was the AntiVir update that caused the problem (it may have been because AVG was installed at the same time but I have no way of knowing) and, as I am on dialup, I was sick of the huge definition file updates (about 15 minutes each provided I didn't do anything else at the same time!). AVG also provides a bootup scan (on Win9x) and e-mail scanning which AntiVir doesn't.

(Note: This was intended to be a warning about the dangers of having 2 AV programs installed at the same time, not an advert for AVG. I respect the opinions of people in this forum and they all say that AntiVir is a much better AV than AVG so I just wanted to explain why I stuck with AVG rather than change to AntiVir.)

[TopperID]

patermann, AntiVir has 2 Services and one autostart, all of which can be simply and completely disabled so that you have nothing running in the background. With that done there would have been no conflict and you could have run AntiVir quite safely as a demand scanner - though you would need to do your updates from a full Administrator account if the Update Service is disabled.

Some AVs leave things running in the background and therefore are less suited to demand scanning, I believe both Avast and AVG fall into this category.

Edit - my comments relate to XP where you can bring up the Services box. I honestly don't know how you proceed on Win98!

[abhi_mittal]

Thanks for the response....settling for Avast! ;D

[wildman]

-{ Quote: "Thanks for the response....settling for Avast! ;D
" }-

:o Some past experiences with Avast:

It has been known to be a memory hog. No apparent problem on machines with larger capacity in this area however.

It also has been known to place operating programs in the temp folder an these items hard to delete if one wants to do so.

Can be cumbersome to set the options if one is not somewhat computer knowledgeable.

Thanks
Wildman
:-\ ???