Antivir - Stability?

Perhaps you were just lucky. I think the best advice to give a *friend* is to use an antivirus program that has excellent protection according to objective tests against real-world malware. AntiVir has worked hard to achieve top status in that arena.

The best I can say to my friends who insist on using a lower tier AV is, "Well, it's better than nothing."

 

The so-called awards are not really significant.

I am more concerned about the failure of such awards to mention that a product might have an acceptable detection rate, but fail in some other area.

For example, for McAfee vS 10:

1. The so called "automatic cleaning" might silently delete files witout giving you an option on the action to be taken. I'm sure not going to do a scan with such a product.

2. It's implementation is tied to IE, tho IE need not be the default browser. See http://forums.mcafeehelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=71842&highlight=.

3. The update mechanism is awful.

4. Does the update mechanism allow program updates once the virus definition subscription is up? i'm not sure about this one.

5. A positive for McAfee is that it does have an active support forum.

 

Lol. Good interface, good detection rate, good updates frequency and in the end they screw everything up with 1 update per 24 hours limitation. What a joke.
24 hours can make all the difference on outbreaks. So i can't recommend it anymore

 

@Rejzor
Hint: The limit is per scheduler job You can update manually as often as you want, or you can create additional update jobs, and it will work like a charm... personally I've had a look at the job files... dumdidum.....

 

Manual updating is not something that i'd use. Updater is there to do its job.

 

If you want it to update at startup you can use win scheduler. I check for updates 5 times a day using timed update jobs and normally I get 2-4 new files per day. OK I know its not the most simple way of doing updates, but all AVs have weak point and with their detection rate I can live with this issue as long as I can get around it..

I dont recommend it to friends who cannot stop the nag screen. Most of my friends want protection without - or very few - popups.

Free Antivir is a good deal and with a little tampering you get all the updates you want.

About stability - it shows the icon - or not - in the sysstray whenever it wants to without much logic. But AVGuard is always in the taskmanager and then I am told its active.

Best Regards

 

As compared to Antivir, what is the frequenvy of updates for Avast? And can u change the update frequency/ preferences for avast?

 

AntiVir update much more times than avast!, and you can change the frequency of the avast! updates...

 

I believe Avast defaults to check for updates every 4 hours (someone correct me if I'm wrong there).. However, you can change this with the Avast External Control utility found here:

http://freeweb.siol.net/razor256/xss/

AntiVir updates however often you schedule it for. Could be every minute theoretically...

 

You can change this feature in avast! Settings...

 

Ok, cool VC, I didn't realize that.. Thanks...

 

Please refer to http://www.excessive-software.eu.tt instead of direct web path...
It's my official address which is also easier to remember.

 

Ok, will do...

 

As far as I remember its update is once in 24 hour, there is no option to make update before that.

 

If you edit the default schedule, you can step thru the screens and on one you can set the interval in minutes that it updates. I believe when you install AntiVir it defaults to an interval of 1440 minutes (once a day). So you can set this interval to anything you want, 60 will make it check for updates every hour. There are more options there as well. I think you can also specify 'Daily' and then set the time of day that it updates.

I don't know how often the AntiVir people actually update their defs, but I think I have heard people say they received updates several times in one day before, so it must be at least daily that they actually update things.

At any rate, you can schedule it to check as often as you like. See the settings options in the Scheduler.

 

Hello,24 hours is the minimum.

 

Wow, it's been a while since I tried it, but I would swear that it used to allow setting to anything you wanted. I remember setting it to 240 once for every 4 hours and it accepted it, but that was a few months ago, right after version 7 came out. Perhaps they changed it to reduce the load on their servers? No idea. I used the NT/2k/XP version also, if that makes a difference. I can't check now since I'm not using it at the moment.. Interesting.. I guess I stand corrected..

PS, as someone above mentioned, you could create additional scheduler jobs to update 'daily' and set the times as you wish, but that's more work I guess..

 

By default, avast! Home Edition will automatically check for updates every 4 hours (240 minutes) while your computer is online, I think it's quite sufficient.

But if you want, you can get avast! Home Edition automatically checks for updates hourly (60 minutes) while you're online: Program Settings > Update (Basic) > Details...

So, this makes a very *big differences* between get checking for updates only once a day and get it 24 times in 24 hours as you can have outbreak several times a day (avast! used to released VPS 3-5 times in 24 hours) and you don't know when (if you have to do it manually). I'm online almost 24 hours (using BitTorrent) so get checking for updates only once a day is something I can't accept and don't recommend to anyone who has such surfing habit.

 

I think on Antivir u try it with making multiple schedules for updates with different times( not sure it will work or not)

BTW I remember,,on dial up, in spite of scheduling Antivir for once a day update, whenever I went online, it used to ckeck for update( multiple times in a day).

However if u are 24 H online then may be u have to try differently as I stated above.

 

Another consideration would be the interval of time between when a new threat appears
and when it gets added to the antivirus vdf.

Last report I saw on that interval was that AntiVir was close to Kaspersky at the top (with a less than four hour average)
and Norton was closer to twentyfour hours, at the bottom of the list.

I also keep the 'Hueristic' Detection set to High and have had No False Positives, hope for this to catch infections before they make vdf.

I am very happy with AntiVir PE Classic and with a dialup it checks Update Automatic on every connection,
three or four Updates a weekday, two to three on weekends.

I also know that it can be touchy about trying to 'edit' a 'default' "Schedule",
even looking at it will disable the Scheduler until AntVir has been restarted.

Best to uncheck the 'default' and "make new job's" on the Schedule Page, for it to do what you want.
Then one Manual Update will restart for you.

 

Free Antivir has 15 options to set updates at a specific time every day.

If you add an update on startup via win scheduler it should be enough for most people. You guys who are 24/7 could use win scheduler to cover whatever frequence you need.

I have had mine set to search 4-5 times a day and the maximum new updates files I have recieved are 4. If I set it up for hourly update check I might even recieve more than 4 updates - but that I dont know.

I am one of those for whom Antivirs original update function doesnt work so I am using Steves workaround starting preupd.exe via win.scheduler - it works 100%. Its all in the Antivir forums - search for preup.exe and you can also find the invisible update instructions.

Frequent updates is not a problem with Antivir - but a bit of work.

Best Regards

 

If you are interested in the number of released VDF updates, have a look here:

http://www.avira.de/en/threats/section/vdfhistory/index.html

As for the scheduler limitation... There are plenty of methods to fix the "problem.

 

TAP,

you can set the frequency update of avast! to 30 seconds

 

Response times 2005-08-22
Reaction Times of the latest MS05-039-based Worm Attacks
You can find the information how fast the AV companies have reacted with a solution against
Bozari.A/B, Drudgebot.B, IRCBot!Var and Zotob.A/B in this Excel sheet (18 KB).

http://www.av-test.org/

Below copied from above site:

"Detection by AV programs, sorted by the product name:

AntiVir fuse.zip 0:19 Worm/Zotob.E
Avast vpsupd 8:04 Win32:Zotob-E [Wrm]
AVG mmav338 11:33 I-Worm/Mytob.WM ...."
_______________________________________________________

Perhaps someone has a link to a more recent test than this report dated: 2005-08-19, 14:00 h GMT

 

To "fix" the problem of antivir updating, all you have to do is create as many scheduled tasks you want to update at a certain time. For example, I have it check every two hours so it checks at 2:00, 4:00, 6:00. 8:00, 10:00, etc. You can then create as many tasks to check even every hour, half-hour, etc. if you wanted too


Alphalutra1