is antivir a good antivirus

Discussion in 'other anti-virus software' started by monicaa_84, Jul 13, 2005.

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  1. Slovak

    Slovak Registered Member

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    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.
     
  2. patermann

    patermann Registered Member

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    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.)
     
  3. TopperID

    TopperID Registered Member

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    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!
     
  4. abhi_mittal

    abhi_mittal Registered Member

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    Thanks for the response....settling for Avast! :D
     
  5. wildman

    wildman Registered Member

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    :eek: 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
    :doubt: o_O
     
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