Free Command and F-Secure AV in the UK

For UK Residents,

If your AV license(s) are due for renewal, or you are thinking of a backup scanner or replacing your free AV, there are some good give aways with Computer magazines in the last month or so. All it costs you is the price of the magazine.

1. Command Antivirus- given away in PCPlus magazine-Issue 207, October, 2003. This retails at £24. www.pcplus.co.uk

2. F-Secure Internet Security 2003- given away in Internet Magazine-November edition, 2003. This program contains the AV and the Firewall and retails at £45($60). www.internetmagazine.co.uk.

Both magazines retail for £4(Internet magazine)-£6(PCPlus).

In the case of the Command AV, you simply register for a serial number. For F-Secure Internet Security, the subscription number is on the CD Wallet with the magazine. In both cases you then receive free updates for 12 months.

Command AV is being 'given away' by a number of other computer magazines but these are offering only 6 months of updates.

Command has this offer every year so I presume their sales to the home market are not too good. However, this is the first time I have seen F-Secure given away.

The F-Secure offer in particular looks very good.

Both programs would offer good protection against viruses. Command AV has a small memory imprint, and would therefore operate particularly well on older computers. FSAV, however, would probably need a newer, more powerful box for its running.

 

Thanks for the heads up Blackcat - just getting my coat on to go to the newsagent now!

 

bought both of these as well (and for the exact same reason ) PC Answers also has the steganos security suite (v4.15) on the front cover, but I haven't had a chance to look at that again yet.

 

F-Secure in particular sounds very tempting especially as I am having problems with McAfee V 7 right now. Would that run ok alongside McAfee or would there be issues? I know the likes of McAfee and Norton don't like other AV's on the same system.

I think I'll go and do some research of F-Secure anyhow, is this the latest version or an old one? Do you know if it updates automatically or not?

Thanks for the info.

 

There's not a bad review on F-Secure on C-Net, but no user-comments. other reviews of the product seem to be quite dated, last F-Secure VB bulletin quoted on the website was for June 2003.

The latest one on the VB Bulletin is for August which was a fail.

Any users here who can give some first-hand experience of F-Secure?

 

my limited first-hand experience -- system consistently hung on reboot (actually, was running so slowly as to be unusable, although the hard drive wasn't spinning), and a cursory look at the event logs seemed to show that the update component (backweb) was having problems. i assumed a conflict with kerio, couldn't really be bothered to look into it more thoroughly, and rolled back to my old av system. googling didn't seem to bring up anyone else having similar problems. (reasonably fresh w2k rebuild.)

not very helpful, i'm afraid, sorry.

 

They are more focusing on enterprise market . As far as I know CSAV is well known name to enterprise market .


tECHNODROME

 

the f-secure internet security bundle (av+firewall) is actually directed towards home users as an all in one solution ..
the av i would rate tied with kaspersky (one component of it is the kav engine)as the market leader in detections.. it's basically just a different GUI compared to the normal version, one big difference is that it cannot be installed without the backweb component for automatic updates.. some users have bad blood against backweb... if you're in doubt about it i can submit you an e-mail i got from f-secure management stating that there is absolutely nothing even suspicious in f-secure backweb

the gui offers a basic configuration like kavlite, select security level high normal etc but there's more options if you dig the gui a little deeper
if f-secure av is configured wrong it can seriously slow down even the most powerful pc's so if you're havin troubles IM me and i'll post screen shots of the recommended settings.. i even installed english version instead of a finnish just to be able to do this

cheers

 

Thanks for the info, I have the software which comes with the magazine, and am thinking of putting it on my system as a back up to the McAfee but I'm a bit concerned about how they'll sit with each other. Looks like a good programme for free though.

 

Wish it had worked for me, to be honest (or that i'd had the time and inclination to work out a fix.) That said, noone else seems to have reported a conflict anywhere, and the uninstall was relatively clean, so I'd say give it a shot on a test system.

 

Or you could start a new thread and post screen shots with recommened settings. The whole community would be greatful to you.


tECHNODROME

 

Removed McAfee and tried to install F-Secure from the disc but updating the virus definitions caused the programme to hang.

Doesn't seem to be a robust product at all.

 

(i'm sure you didn't make this mistake, but it doesn't hurt to ask...) you are allowing the update traffic through your firewall, right? (although even then, having it hang indefinitely is certainly not a good failure mode.)

 

The firewall was switched off during install and updating. Updating of Feb and June definitions worked fine but the latest and most up to date was dragging for a worrying amount of time, after a few minutes I stopped the process and removed it.

Would be interested to hear if anybody else had a more successful install of the free product. Maybe it was a one off glitch.