Do Older AV Programs Provide Enough Protection?

As newer versions of most anti-virus programs are released, they seem to get bigger and bigger. Granted, there are new whiz-bang features that make your clothes even softer and whiter. My question is, how about those older versions that are still being updated? For instance, everybody seems to agree that Norton is a pig. However, Symantec still puts out definitions for their programs that were released 3 or 4 years ago. Morever, those versions required fewer resources. So, do those 3-4 year old programs provide enough protection in today's world, or is it better just to use something more modern?

 

I dunno. Some of them might still be good... Then again, some of them might have outdated heuristics or something.

BTW, if you want a small, barebones AV that will give you a lot of protection, go for F-Prot or Command. I've used the F-Prot trial version before - the on-access scanner is so light on resources that it's sometimes hard to remember that it's running.

 

Generally the 'newer' AV versions are probably better for protection, due to improved scan engines and heuristics, and better compatibility with the more recent Operating systems.

New scanning engines are generally able to unpack better and some AV's have acquired extra features such as e-mail scanners compared to their older versions.

Some AV's have made big improvements. For example the new NOD beta adds potentially much better protection abilities to NOD v2 and most people would agree that it now offers better protection against trojans and viruses than version 1. Norman has had an e-mail scanner added and the new version of F-prot and Command will offer a better unpacking engine.

However, some older engines, KAV 3.5, McAfee 4, will still give you very good protection, due to their large signature database, AND have little effect on system resources/memory. In fact I have only just upgraded AVP 3.5 to KAV 5 on one of my computers.

If you have an older machine SOME of these older scanners may give you good SHORT-TERM protection. You will though, eventually have to upgrade. However, if you have a new computer, bloatware and resource usage are generally not important factors to consider, protection and stability are. Therefore, most people will choose the newest version available, as most people think the 'newest' is always the best, which is not always true.

 

Usually newer programs provide better and faster unpacking support along with better heuristics. Sometimes you need special engine to detect specific nasties like those i think Netskys that are in locked archive and with password provided in e-mail's body.