Ashampoo's AV? yea or nea

I remember a couple months back that Ashampoo had some promo in which they had their AV on sale. From what I remember, the AV was an Antivir OEM of some sort, although maybe an earlier version. Has anyone used this AV program with success? Also, does it have the email scanner? I am needing to find a low cost product for my brother's computer and will probably either use Ashampoo's (have a big discount available), Avast, AVG or AOL's AVS and back up any of those four with Comodo's BOclean.

The rest of the set-up should look something like-

either ZA free firewall or Comodo (although I do not think the continued pop-up warnings from Comodo will be well received and I don't want to be answering the telephone every five minutes)

Try to convince my brother to migrate his browser from IE6 to FF and add the adblock plus and noscript plug-ins; otherwise upgrade to IE7 and lock it down some and possibly add Spyware Blaster and IE7pro

If he sticks with IE6/7 will try to add Spyware Terminator and no have the HIPS or AV not active

Also, if he stays with IE6/7 we may add something like Cyberhawk

Finally, we'll download something like SAS for on-demand scans once a week or so.

I think he currently has dial-up but will be moving to dsl soon. Anything else that should be added?
I think it would be safe to say that my brother is a safe surfer but has become more active on the internet because of work and personal obligations- I think he sponsors some school activities now and is on web sites and lots of email to go through.

 

nea...

 

a explanation is always nice.....
@acr1965,
viewing site advisor report in firefox says exploit but i dont have any problems with the ashampoo website.
the site advisor plugin in firefox didnt block the loading of the site thou.
im saying Site advisor FP.
lodore

 

Ashampoo Anti-Virus does not have a full-fledged email scanner. The latest version claims to "improve" email scanning but the exact changes are not mentioned and I'm not aware of anyone who has tried the latest version. Ashampoo AV detects the same stuff as AntiVir Premium, but heuristics are disabled in real-time monitor (Ashampoo support told me that they will fix this in a future version). The biggest problem, however, is that Ashampoo requires you to pay for version upgrades (1.x --> 2.0 is paid for example), which may not be very financially lucrative as it may seem now. Also, there is only a primary action to be taken in case of malware detection, no secondary action can be defined (i.e. no such thing as "clean, or else quarantine", you must either allow it to clean or you can rename/quarantine/delete instead of cleaning).

 

Why not just buy a 'good' scanner. There are several mentioned here: Kav, Nod32, Avira, Dr. Web, F-prot! Trial a few yourself and either one is just great! There are freeware programs, but they all lack something, compared to the paid programs, that's not hard to understand!
Eeverybody is investing in great, new computers, but don't want to fork out any buck for a proper security setup!
Ashampoo is a software factory with all types of software.....from burning dvd's to creating greetingcards and I would never use any security setup from a factory like that. Invest in a specialized product and feel safe!

 

I still may buy him some suite or another. But I fear he'll just let the subscription lapse. At least with freeware all he has to do is let the programs stay up to date. That's assuming they remain free. But, knowing my brother, I would rather have him with a Comodo or ZA firewall and some free anti-virus as well as BOClean, maybe even FF for a browser. That may be a better suite set of security than many paid ones anyway. Plus it should always be up to date. If you knew my brother you would know why I am doing this. It's not necessarily for him to have a great suite today but more for him to have viable protection this time next year.

 

That means he is unlilely to re-register as one free Av I know requires periodically or install new versions of programs when required. You can't protect people from themselves. They have to learn from their mistakes. For some it means they have to take a hard fall.