Avast Home or AVG Free

I prefer Avast over AVG. I think it's a better product and has more and better features.
Frequent updates are also a bonus.
Avast does have a resident scanner and on-demand scanner.

Regards,
bill

 

I've used both at different times and AVAST never let me down. AVG caught all the bugs trying to get into my machine, but failed on my wife's computer.

 

I'm with avast-4 (Home) too -- I originally got steered to it by friends who said that on a number of occasions it had caught things for them that had slipped past Norton and other "name-brand" services.

One other plus it has, I didn't see mentioned here -- service and support. They operate support forums similar to here (at http://forum.avast.com/?lang=ENG ), and participants range from the professionals right down to users who just got their first computer.

The "team" (Alwil) is in the Czech Republic, UT+2 or 3 if I recall, so time-zone differences can sometimes be a problem, but there's almost always experienced users on line so responses are normally quite quick, same as here.

 

I'd rather avast! I used AVG for over an year and con post some advantages of avast! (in my opinion);

1) both are good (ITW viruses and malware) but avast seems to be better with trojans.
2) avast! Home has a lot of more features (and settings) than AVG Free: nine languages, skins, general configuration.
3) incremantal update (very fast).
4) frequency of the updates (at least, twice a week).
5) incomparable forum support (http://avast.forum.com).
6) good with packers, generic trojan detection, Heuristics and polymorphic.
7) the false positives are quite few right now.

Hope this help.

 

I'm trying Avast as we speak.

I have tried AVG in the past.

More impressed with Avast at the present

Very good product.

what I liked:
+ nice user interface
+ fast scan (faster than Mcafee) though maybe not as complete
+ like the email scan
+ forum help

When I start to see Avast at the top of the heap on VB and other tests in detection, I will definitely switch to Avast.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2004_02.php

Avast VB record

AVG VB record

 

Talking about Virus Bulletin... they retested avast with respect to the February 2004 WindowsNT comparative, and guess what - we got the prize!

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?avist.xml

 

Congrats, you guys!

 

Great! Avast! gets better & better. Now, lets work on Polymorphic thingy!



tECHNODROME

 

that's great
congrats Vlk

 

My neighbor just installed AVAST and this is the problem she has encountered. Is it customary for Avast to ask for a name & passoword. Any help would be appreciated. I forgot to mention that she uses ZAP, WinXP.

AVAST! SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 server address is changed to ****** [I took the numbers out] and they keep asking me for my name and password. I can't access Outlook Express

 

Peaches4U

It does happen, same problem occurs with norton anti-virus 2004. Reconfigure the emails settings go into avast and access the emails options of avast.

( Now don't quote me on the options for the email I'm not sure )

 

Well, I guess half a loaf of bread is better than nothing. Thanks for your reply - I have passed it on.

 

Could you explain this point furhter? I have being re-reading the excellent thread here http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=2892
but I only see a brief reference in AVAST

"(some of them does, i.e. Avast! which always (ok, usualy) rates in VB's 100% award group - but you can see tests - it can't identify even simply encrypted viruses exactly). So most of top avirs are using some kind of tracing (i.e. emulating) because it is required today to handle many of complicated viruses,"

I read the whole section on Dark avenger, but in the article the answer it says is" Algorithmic scanners"
which I presume AVAST has?

Is it possible to explain this is layperson terms?

1) What is emulation?

2) Another very informative thread is http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=20062;start=msg122543#msg122543
when they start discussing different matters of detecting Trojans. I'm trying to understand what's the difference between "generic unpacking" and "static unpacking". I can guess the meaning of emulation.

Thank you in advance.

 

I'm currently trying out Avast... was using AVG before which did catch a script virus in a temp internet file.

It appears that the preferred choice is Avast. So I'll keep trying it for a while more.

I have a question however about a new service that seems to be in the Windows System folder that is now asking for server access in Zone Alarm, which only seems to have happened since installing Avast... it is... Distributed Com Service RPCSS.exe.

Is this a service that Avast has to use to function... is this normal for it to pop up in ZA like this after running Avast... and is it required for the program to function within itself as I seem to see from a search that this service is sometimes used by programs to communicate with different "parts" of themselves, and so I'm wondering if this is linked to the 2 icons that Avast generates... one for the main anti-virus scanner and the other for the VRDB generator... so maybe this is something to do with it.

Does anyone else using Avast notice this... or am I getting confused here.

BTW... is this VRDB of any actual use or can it be disabled with no ill effects as I don't see any help info on actually implementing it as a rescue if it was ever needed.

 

avast! Home Edition have a better detection rate, better support, better configuration...

I only recommend AVG Free Edition for a very older pc...

 

Ok VaMPiRiC_CRoW,

Thanks for that... yes... I'm kinda warming to it more and more.

I just been looking over the forum over at Avast... very good too.

In fact... I found out by reading over the posts there that the RPCSS service is indeed being generated by Avast... something to do with the Chest function... so I'm happy about this now... just need to block it in ZA.

Cheers

 

See here:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/emulation.htm

Cheers

 

zarzenz,
For more info about RPCSS have a look at the following thread on the avast forums.Specifically reply #20.

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=651;start=15

 

Amerk 5... wow.

Thank you so much for pointing me to this thread, as even though I'd seen other threads over there that confirmed this RPCSS activity as being caused by Avast... I thought that to disable it in the firewall was enough... but now I'm not so sure and not happy at all with this.

I simply cannot have things like this happening on my computer and will not be renaming DLL's etc to try and fool the software over this.

This to me has spoilt what was starting to look like a good free anti-virus solution, but I'm not so sure now.

I'll do some ShieldsUp tests later on port 135 but I'm not happy at all with this situation at this moment.

This should not be happening in my opinion and the heat on that thread proves this to me... it's not good to have programs calling up server action behind the scenes like this.

I thank you very much for this pointer.

>EDIT

Ok... I just probed port 135, both with RPCSS being fully blocked and then quickly fully opened... and it came back stealthed... so that's confusing.

Not sure what's happening now... but will need to see if the auto update works in time. But it just seems messy now to have to do all this.

 

And start learning how to read Vlk explaind everything Paranoids

 

Yeah... I'm just re-reading the whole thread over there now.

I may have gotten confused over this thing.

Cheers.

 

If you don't want RPC listening, just block it on the firewall... what's the deal? As I said in the thread, RPC's network functionality is not required by avast. The only thing avast uses from rpc is local inter-process communication (no network).

Cheers
Vlk

 

I prefer AVG Free

because the tray icon isn't wierd animated and distracting
basic user interface without switching through many stuff
regular ans small updates
doesn't require home address in registration... it only requires name and e-mail
doesn't fail lastest (at time of writing) virusbtn test... like avast does... i think

 

and also fast scanning time
resident only takes a few KB of memory or something

 

Yes... to be honest I think I got a bit confused here this morning after reading the thread that Amerk 5 pointed to and then even though I had already blocked the service in the firewall for some reason I thought some of the posters over there were saying that blocking it was not going to prevent the port 135 being opened... but then I did some tests and found it always stealthed and then after re-reading I couldn't even see why I got mixed up in the first place... must have been too early for me or something.

The only thing that was starting to concern me was all this talk of renaming DLL's which I thought was going to extreme lengths and didn't really feel like going down that road.

Anyway... I think I'm happy again now... and it was very worthwhile doing all this to get more info and knowledge, even if I did confuse myself to start with... put that down to only just having gotten up in the morning over here in the UK.

Thanks guys.

I got to do some hard drive ghosting now so I'll be gone for a while.