Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium for 6 months

False positives can be bad, but not detecting can be worse. Avira has done a lot to lower the number but still provide some of the best protection.

 

Run preupd.exe as a scheduled task under a different account. You won't see any window anytime.

 

False Positives can be WORSE than not detecting for any educated user like anyone here. FP's desensitize the user so that when a real virus is encountered there is a very big risk the user will assume it is another FP. I think an AV with a high rate of FP's is a dangerous AV unless you go to porn sites, warez, P2P and use IE. In that case then a high FP rate along with a high detection rate is probably ok...that sort of user will just delete everything anyway and won't care if they delete part of an essential program because they have no respect for their computers in the first place because they know nothing about a computer and don't want to learn. For those users, Avira or Bit Defender or DrWeb are fine. For the rest of us, we don't need such high detection rates in the first place because we practice safe hex so high rates of FP's especially on completely innoucous stuff like Sysinternals poses a high risk of making one jaded so when a real virus does come along one reacts inappropriately. Avira's FP rate is better now than it was when I got it a year ago and it is not as high as DrWeb or Bit Defender (what happened to them)? Still, Avira has work to do to get their FP rate lower so they don't get justly penalized on VB and IBK's tests.

 

i dont believe there is an FP problem,

infact... the only FP problems that have occured worldwide, are from the lesser FP AV's, this would be norton and kaspersky.

also, drweb wasnt the highest FP'ers, and their new technology was tested

 

Its ok Mele. Alot of the points you make are true. And a FP is just as bad as not detecting. I agree to that Avira has done a good job at fixing this and still has some work to do. But all in all, it is a very good AV, an the suite is nice to.

 

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how one can say this. An FP at least gives me a choice, whereas a virus missed ensures that I'm completely screwed. How are the two the same?

 

Don't worry, they aren't. The king of switching AV's and Avatars also contradicts himself.

 

Avatar's aside. I believe I am the king of switching AV's. LOL. I did try Avira again a few times recently, but each time it made a Corel WordPerfect Office Document of mine freeze after opening it and I had to use Task Manager to shut WP down. Not sure why it does this, but after I uninstall Avira I no longer have this happen. When i used Avira awhile back however, I didn't have this problem so I don't know if the last program update is to blame or what.

 

I had problems with Word Perfect after I installed Avira also.

 

Did you guys report this in the Avira forum? I have Microsoft Word and have never had Word Perfect. If I did I would test the new ver. 8 beta and see if what you are saying happens with it.

 

Totally agree with this. I use Avira and at least it alerts me. It may be a flase positive but I'd sooner be asked or warned than not be asked at all.

 

As I have stated in this forum many times, the false positive "scare" is over blown. I have never had a false positive on over 70 boxes running high risk on the internet 16 hours a day. We use Avira, and we have used 11 other AVs as well-and never had a fp in years of being on the net. In addition, with thousands of clients, we have never heard of a fp on any of their boxes. While this may not be a statistically significant sample size, even if I get a fp, that is not the same thing as actual malware as some here have argued. In any case, Avira detects better than just about anything else.

A fp is not the same thing as a virus-not even close.

 

Not sure what sort of a statistical sample we are running. But I have had false positives with Avira before- actually a number of times. It did not really bother me too much though.

AV-Comparatives' latest Retrospective/Proactive shows that of the 17 av's tested, only one did not have a false positive (NOD32). Avira had "many", actually 16 FP's. Those 16 included half from signatures and the other half from heuristics. One of the signature FP's was because of an Outlook package.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2007_11.php

 

I will take the false positives anyday. NOD may not have had a false positive but watch out for the trojans. I used NOD for a year and scanned with Kaspersky and it found 6 trojans. NOD is slow on the updates.

 

It amazes me how many around here feel FP's are acceptable. With VB 100 one FP is failure. I suppose on your home PC anything goes. In a business environment an FP means someone has to stop work and call a help desk. The lost time and cost of the help desk are easily over $100 per incident. Worse yet, most corporate machines ave very similar, so an FP on one is likely to be an FP on many.

 

Diver, I think most people would agree that zero FPs would be the best goal to shoot for, however, given a choice between doubt and hence an FP and no detection at all, I think I'd take the FP so I at least have a choice. If it turns out to be a virus and it's not detected, then I am hosed, no?

Also, this is primarily a home user forum and not a discussion of business applications, so I will dismiss that point, even though of course in a business envirnment you don't want any FPs..

 

My view is that having many FP's is cheating. An AV could flag every executable using runtime compression. The result would be great proactive detection and large numbers of FP's. So many that the user never really knows if there is a FP or the real thing. At some point even the home user is going to be confused. Perhaps a "yellow flag" warning that an unusual run time compressor is in use is better rather than a full "red flag" that the file is infected.

I am even more concerned that some AV's have consistent 90% (or so) detection across tests by many labs, yet have many FP's. 90% is simply mediocre, yet these products have some rather rabid fans around here. Different strokes for different folks.

 

most people count a 'suspicous' or 'probably infected with....' as an FP, this should not be the case.

its 'these files' that should be checked with your vendor for verification, or quarentined until further notice.

FP's should only be signature based detections.

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but of course, some AVs flag everything as suspicous which is just wrong.

 

One reason I stopped using Avira Free was the difficulty of downloading updates - sometimes the servers were not available or the download was very slow. Is this a problem with "Personal Edition Premium" as well? Also, how often are new signatures made available? One reason I like AVG is there's an update every day.

 

Nope, that's only the free version.
Premium is using high speed servers and I have yet to experience any problems (2 months and still going strong).

I'd like to think every day, but the way it tells you is very misleading to say the least..
Oh and not to confuse anyone, date shown is: Day-Month-Year

 

that means virus defs were updated on the 4th, 2 days ago

maybe they dont add signatures at weekends.

 

They do, I just got updated

 

yes, i see.

its strange that avira would not update for 2 days though, they are usually 2-3 times per day.

must be this time of year eh?

 

Mine says the last defs are dated 1-4-08 and it's 1-6-08 now. I check for updates every 4 hours... so they're almost 2 days old right now....

 

As with most AVs, they do when needed.