free antivirus

which free antivirus would you use as backup on-demand scanner

 

BitDefender Free 8 or Avast! Home 4.6

 

BitDefender Free.

 

As a backup I would also use Bitdefender.

 

Bitdefender 8 free (disadvantage is you need to have some services running to use it) or AntiVir (just don't install the real-time guard).

 

i concur

 

BitDefender or Anti Viri. In that order.

 

AVG!!!!!!

 

AntiVir...

World Industries

 

I guess that depends on what AV you're using.

G DATA AntiVirusKit 2005 professional use a dual engine KAV & BitDefender, seems like the logical choice as a backup scanner would be Bitdefender 8 Free.

Can't imagine what AVG, avast! or AntiVir could do better than BitDefender does....

 

I run antivir free as resident and run bitdefender free for ondemand.

 

I use Bitdefender as an on-demand scanner because it has very good heuristics, so it is one of the better products for finding unknown viruses in the wild. However, it isn't as good as Avast and H+BEDV Antivir (we're talking about all free products) at finding known viruses.

What I really do is use Avast and H+BEDV together online: Avast, once it detects the presence of another antivirus product, automatically shuts down its online scanner, but leaves its email and webscanner modules running. So Avast is handling the Internet. But I have H+BEDV running its online scanner, so its handling file reads, and I use it on demand as a backup. Now that they are introducing incremental updates at H+BEDV, this is a reasonable approach. However, WARNING: it is not a trivial matter to install Avast and H+BEDV so that they do not conflict. I don't take responsibility if you try it! Of course, if you use Avast alone, it has an online scanner too. However, once you install another antivirus package, even Bitdefender which has no online services, Avast will stop its online scanner. For full Avast services, their product must be installed by itself (antispyware products don't seem to bother it).

Hence, I use both H+BEDV and Bitdefender as backups to Avast. While Avast seems to be in exactly the same category of quality as H+BEDV, I don't want to give up the overlapping coverage that comes from using several antivirus packages.

However, I'm not a security expert that can express a professional opinion on which is the best backup security scanner (although, obviously, much depends on what your primary scanner is: if it's good at heuristics, find a product that's good at known viruses; and vice versa).

Does anyone know how to force Avast to keep its online scanner running in the presence of other antivirus packages? Then I would merely turn H+BEDV's online scanner off and use H+BEDV as a pure on demand scanner backup.

Thanks.

George75

 

This is what I used to do for fun, I use AVG Free and Avast Home in the same time with no problems.

- I install AVG Free with its Resident Shield/on-demand scanner only.

- I install Avast Home with its Web Shield (HTTP scanner)/Network Shield (network traffic scanner)/Internet Mail (e-mail scanner)/on-demand scanner but its Standard Shield (file scanner) NOT installed.

This way AVG Free and Avast Home work nicely together with no overlap, no slowdown. AVG's Resident Shield scans local files on hard disk in real time while Avast's Web Shield/Network Shield/Internet Mail scan HTTP, network traffic, POP3/SMTP/IMAP in real time.

But when Avast Home is more enough for me, it's fast, really ligh on real-time performance with fast-small efficient signature update distribution, so I have no reasons to use other AVs alongside with it except having scan my hard drive by online scanners from time to time.