Is antivirus really necessary?

yep, thats wayyy too much clutter on my machine.

here is one for you, and i guarantee it FLYSSSSS super fast


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Firefox:

Adblock Plus
Fasterfox
NoScript
IEtab
cookie culler

Rollback RX Pro 8.1

Drweb 4.44 (custom install without spidermail)

Prevx 2.0 (Set to Pro level)

System Mechanic 7


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give it a try, secure and super super fast.

 

For the average user, an antivirus is still the best baseline protection. Even though this can be viewed as the oldest form of pc security software, I think its idea is still the best (but sandboxes come up a close second). Newer programs like Prevx and threatfire also improve on the classical HIPS model for the average user.

The problem with classical HIPS is that most people will click on everything, so the best security programs out there for the masses are antiviruses, Sandbox HIPS, and "sorta" HIPS like Prevx, threatfire, antibot/safeconnect etc.

Medium knowledge users would benefit from a good "anti-leak" firewall, but I see too many people not knowing how to use it. They would benefit from the windows firewall since their clicking destroys the protection anyway.

 

Or, SAM with you and forget that all!

PS. I'm waiting the YEAR when my Avast Linux Home Edition antivirus and USB stick Ewido micro anti-malware can find some nasties. You don't understand that the war against malwares has been lost already under µ$'s OS.

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

Do you buy a car when it's so bad that 22 % of these have no brakes at all?

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

if i could buy a lifetime licence for both prevx 2.0 and drweb, i would.

why?

because 'I know' when ive found something good, and what works for my setup.

when you find this, there is no need to look at new stuff from other vendors,

wink wink trjam.

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and both are softwares that some would certainly say never too, crazy eh?

dont knock it, till you have tried it.

lightest setup ive ever had, and im pretty sure im protected, at least i feel safe.

 

know how you feel. With Coming Soon and Sandboxie I feel very secure.

 

The booting time after starting in my SAM to the "suomi24.fi" site is now so bad as 1 min 40 sec. How it is with those Vista guys? My system is Acer Aspire 3002 WLMi with 448 MB RAM usable.

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

i went back to XP and everything is sooo much better,

i mean i realllllllly liked vista and only changed because my itunes would not work on vista properly, however...... everything is running sooo much quicker now that im staying on XP. I now have more speed, with less problems and less pop ups, and alot more resources to play around with.

 

I just experienced my first 3 minute shutdown with Vista (twice), which of course happened only after installing Bitdefender - my normal is 10 seconds. Testing BD these past two days has convinced me that antivirus protection is not worth the performance and stability costs.

As the old saying goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Vista wasn't broke. Now the problem will be getting rid of all traces of Bitdefender after I uninstall it.

 

When 22 % of µ$'s OS computers are corrupted, how can you say that everything is sooo much better, it's actuallually a warzone where you are living it.

I'm 52 year's old and I just can't convince my 19-, 20- and 22-year old kids to abandon that µ$'s crap OS to Linux, am I a freek?

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

I actually decided to go for something like this myself, only a tad lighter. I threw out my bulky McAfee suite and DSA. Into the dustbin went every installed security app (except the HP protected tools which uses an embedded infinion chip for various disk and crypto stuff)

Purchased and installed PrevX2 and Online Armor (firewall disabled) Amazing how light this is compared to the McAfee suite which alone weighed in at around 135M. Don't think PrevX is geared towards detecing rootkits so I might need something for that.

 

I have to admit one thing, µ$ OS is very good to gamers. Let the gamers do their things but the adults with their money have that Linux all the time. Personally, I haven't need to play with games because I've satisfied to my wife after 24 years.

Best regards,
Firefighter!

PS. And especially to my collie girl Lily, which you can see everytime I wrote in! It's tough!

 

That's what I did some time back. I even went as far as taking off my firewall, so that ports 135 and 445 were wide wide open. For all their blustering talk, nothing ultimately happened at all.

 

Firefighter,
What distro do you run? I've tried Suse, Fedora, Blag, Gentoo, FreeBSD, Mandrake (Mandriva), Zenwalk, etc, etc, etc, but always went back to Ubuntu. Been with them ever since Breezy 5.10.

 

Is an antivirus really necessary? Well, I've decided to remove AVG free...was using Antivir free, but no antivirus now and I can feel the difference even though AVG is considered light on resources.

I'm running Vista Home Premium with DEP for all programs, leaving UAC on, and using Windows Defender real time protection and Vista firewall.

I've changed default browser back to IE7 in protected mode. Also using IEPro7 and K9 web protection. If I need a scan I'll use a site scan.

For Vista users make sure you try out one of the latest performance updates just released (KB943899. You'll have to manually download it, not available in WU. This update did make a difference on my system. Update is not included in SP1 RC. I tried the public SP1 RC and it caused some issues so I used FD ISR and got rid of it for now.

 

I have SAM 2007.1 Linux. The only multilingual PCLOS based distro I've found so far and the only which I managed to get my wlan working, it's superb. I have to admit that I'm not a Linux maestro, but still even I managed to get that SAM working and Avast in it too.

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

you forget that you are talking to mostly 'non-geek' users^^if u feel like spending like one year to learn your tube to do basics like open most videos s and play music,encode decode movies etc then hell,i'd rather make stew on my machine and live happy with some billions of viruses^^the purpose of pcs being created is to make our lives easier,not misserable enough to hate them^^u dun get it?ask your wife or daughter to use use ur box and as a gamerr also,ow you can keep your linuxes ;]


back on topic,yes AV or other relevant types of defence will be necessary as long as there are pc's that trade files,use IM or P2P mail and being used by kids

 

PCLOS is truly superb and with today's Linux distros, no one needs to be a Geek to use them.

 

Now I finally have found a real comedian in here. You have to be joking, right?

Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

I only use antivirus because of file infectors. Even though they are in minority, they are absolute pain in the ass to remove. And i belive rarely anyone knows how to manually remove the viral part from clean files. Trojans and worms are easy. You just delete them. Anyone can do that. For file infectors you have to rely on tools provided by experts.

 

of cource it was an "over reacting" statement.personally i have a limited experience on several OS's but what i meant to say is that none offers the freedom that my current does i mean come on dude.even getting the drivers was enough pain to drive away users ;p anyway.if we keep this up the thread will end up dead and thats unfair for the OP

back on topic..many voices around say ditch your AV and use solutions like returnil powershadow etc.and with an online scan every now+then that could work

 

I will second that solution. It just plain works.

 

I'm still on Windows and even though I know about Linux, I won't switch. Why? Because I don't have any problems with my current Windows installation.

You're not a freak, but if you're having serious problems with a Windows installation, I would question why.

 

Not for everyone but certainly something to consider. Of all the possible security softwares available AVs tend to be the ones that (a) slow things down (b) produce false positives and (c) miss anything new.

In 11 years I have never seen a real live virus - This is probably mainly due to my surfing habits.

anyway - the question Is antivirus really necessary ? answer has to be no - especially if other protections are in place ( system Images, Password protections, Returnil, deepfreeze 6,....)

 

my feelings have changed. I really feel a good Hips and something like Sandboxie is the best route to go. Antivirus software times, have past them by.