Avira woes

Thank you for that wake up call! I was about to download Avira for the sake of my computer but now I feel like switching to NOD. And AV's really are the thing of the past. When overclocking gets famous I'll overclock mah old and rusty Pentium 4 so I can get a security suite!

 

No problem I was using NOD32 for years but now it's ESET mode much different. I was going to wait until version 5 or 6 as 2 and 3 I had issues with it. Right now I need to find another AV to use. I don't want one that going to use too much resources or hog, hang or really doesn't protect and let every pest to come on in! I am trying to keep them out..

 

The Avira scanner is among the fastest out there and I have tested others that I will not name except to say that they are among top notch AVs. When the multi core option is enabled in Avira scanner, it can scan my terabyte drives faster than any other. As for FPs, I and others who run Avira in this forum will tell you that even on Avira with its highest heuristic settings, we hardly get any FPs.

About other testing sites, your assertion being that their testing may not be conducive to home av assessment parallels to among the wildest statements I have come across and directly insinuates that folks like IBK don't really know their jobs.

 

You have to remember that a lot of criticism of Avira is because others are asserting a lot of nonsense in many cases as a ruse to simply promote the AV they are using.

Avira's scanner is the fastest (by far) I have ever used, and I get zero FPs with maxed-out heuristics.

 

Yep and in this case I fell for it hook line and sinker it seems.

 

Not to start a fight thread but Avira scanner is much faster and better then NOD32.
only to my little scan-test

 

Avira was faster in 2001 than it's is in 2009. But who knows what you all running on your systems. Everyone going to see it fast. Compare to all that's out there F-Prot AV 3x. was the quickies. To me F-Prot AV and NOD32 3x at the same type of speed. Game is much different 9 years ago for Avira.

 

I use it because:

1. it is free
2. it has a great detection rate, for free
3. it is reasonably fast, for free
4. it is simple, for free
5. it does one thing only, and for free
6. it uses little resources apart from starting or updating, even when it is for free
7. it updates pretty reliably, even when it is free
8. did I mention, it is free ?

Or, as Mel Gibson said in Braveheart,
FREEDOM!

Sul.

 

Yes a lot of them are now free as well.. This above what you use has been around for years now and it's still free.

 

I still remember running Avira version 6

 

yep, and it was faster then the current one.

 

For those with multi core CPUs and I am sure that now represents quite a few here, turn on the muti core option in Avira and then see the speed improve, thats how you can judge its speed.In terms of scanning speed vis a vis OS, in my experience, XPx64 with indexing turned off yields the fastest benchmark.

 

lol, yes, you mean the old Luke Filewalker ?? That was funny.

Sul.

 

ok at the moment avira seems the best, consistent scan results at the top, very fast (with the optimized scan ticked) and according to av comparitives its got quite an edge on all other freebies atm. i am all for trying new stuff and always like to have the better one, i heard avast 5.0 is going for some pretty good new technique for finding malware, i cant actually find the post with features but it definately looks a goer so i MAY be changing soon but we will see. Also if avg would like to win me over they perhaps should improve something because the av-comparitives results are getting lower each year.

 

AVIRA is good, no doubt in that. Especially since they don't even use any advanced methods of emulation or something. And they detect s**tload of stuff with heuristics. What's even more impressive is the time they needed from mediocre AntiVir 6 up to current version 9.
AntiVir 6 was crappy for me, with version 7 they intorduced new heuristics and in just 1 year they launched themself to the top and still holding it strong.

If you look at others, they had a more gradual progress that was technically just as effective, but took much longer.

 

I remember trying Avira out many times. At that time AVG was becoming popular, but I always thought AVG was lame because it told you it found something, but was never very intuitive about what to do. I used f-prot a lot back then. Avira was not as good then as it is now on tests, but even then it was pretty slim. And that was hard to do over f-prot. I still think, out of the box, it is the slimest AV with best performance right now.

Sul.

 

Of course. It was missing lots of unpacking back then which it can do now. Which results in scanning 5-10 times more files than before. You can't expect to have the same scan speed as before for this, right? Just alone adding support for NSIS and CHM brings down you scan speed alot.

Comodo is just light because they got almost zero unpacking. The insane high number of signatures they got also indicates they have almost zero generic detection abilities.

 

Just look at the virus section of definitions. 5 digit variants of Virut?
This alone tells me that there is something seriously wrong with the engine if they have to add signature for each and every different sample they get.
Thats just bad. Especially when it comes to polymorphic malware, where you simply need engine advanced enough to detect it properly.
Because adding samples for them never really ends.

 

Months? I'd seriously be thinking about changing antivirus program if its lackin that bad Too much malware to be messing around with a weak software.

ROFL

 

How do you know they are improving it? How exactly they are improving it? The huge number of static detections, especially for polymorphic malware (infectors like Sality, Virut) or server-side polymorphic ones like Waledac) clearly shows that they don't have either/both the tech nor skilled people to do it properly. You know, making a good AV is a bit more than just getting access to the VirusTotal samples and adding unique fingerprints for every single sample.

 

On a fast system (and mine is very fast) Avira's scanner is much faster than NOD32.

 

Some of these people are simply promoters of the AV they are using. Most of them don't know if there are improvements and many AV firms in my view cannot do the job properly.

 

Scanning speed for NOD32 and Avira are about the same on my system.
Av-comparatives also showed NOD32 and Avira scanning throughput to be about the same.

 

That is put on low prio for investigating because it causes no serious problems (Avira works, the defragging works, but it triggers delayed). They are working on getting the EU2 ready for release which should iron out most of the major known bugs of AV9. Maybe the schedule after that allows investigating the idle problem.

 

Only with version 9 the multi core option has been given, when that is ticked, scanning throughput is the fastest as compared to others, I have seen all my 8 cores used and same with a i7.