Misc. programs: your opinions?

For those using current versions of BoClean, and PestPatrol... can you tell me about the product: does it serve you well? Would you buy it again? I'd like to hear your thoughts-opinions of the program/s as an end-user, as I have been thinking about buying one or perhaps both.

And - if this 2nd part of my query's in the right spot, I hope - I have an older free ver. of ZA's firwall, but I wonder... does it protect against incoming >and< outgoing traffic? Or, is it perhaps time to upgrade or buy newer ver. or perhaps even another firewall? Opinions on firewalls will also be appreciated; not trying to stir up flamewar or a "who's best" discussion but rather, I really like to hear from those using a product everyday and who have come to trust their chosen line of defense, and can find help for a product if they need it.

{Using PC w/WIN98SE, dial up connection}.

And lastly, anyone heard of or use, A2 anti-trojan/worm/dialer program?

Thanks, for advice/opinions. SG1 (Pat)

 

ZA protects and alerts from incoming (can be turned off, it becomes annoying having the popup window all the time) and outgoing (program alert). I have used it for 10 years without a problem, it plays nicely alongside my other security products.

I use Ewido for trojans, it has just updated to a realtime monitor with auto-updates, very nice...

Hope this helps...

Cheers

 

I use Pest Patrol and A Squared and would say that Pest Patrol is an ok product, but it seems to have way too many false positives for a beginner (or anyone) to handle. It's kinda of annoying how many FP's you will get using PP, but in all fairness it does seem to be improving somewhat. If you don't have anything else i suppose PP is better than nothing. I use PP as just another point of view, but wouldn't really rely on what it finds to be real malware, because usually what it finds, turns out to be just another false positive.

If you do decide to get and use PP i would suggest you post here or on another website (that deals with these types of issues) your findings, and see if others have the same, as a way to double check if you have a false positive or not. But seeing how Pest Patrol closed their forums some time ago you can't check there. I wonder why they did that, don't you? Perhaps it's because the amount of complaints was crashing the site? Maybe.

A Squared is another average anti-malware product, but i do have the free version (never tried the pro version) and run it every once and awhile. It never really finds anything, but that doesn't mean it won't at some point, so i do recommend you get it and try it out, it certainly can't hurt you having it.

I never tried Bo-Clean, but have heard it is an excellent product from most who do use it. But i think it lacks an on-demand scanner.

A couple other really good programs you could try are Spybot, Ad-Aware, and SpywareBlaster. These three are top notch programs definitely worth having. Hth.

 

Agreed, this is what is set up on my system and they all play together nicely:

1. Nod32 Beta - Anti-virus
2. Zone Alarm (free) - Visual outgoing alerts
3. Spyware Blaster (free) - Spyware Prevention
4. Spyware Guard (free) - Browser Hijack prevention
5. Spybot Search and Destroy (free) - if running the above 2 programs, should remain fairly clean
6. Adaware (free) - same as above
7. Script Defender (free) - Script protection
8. System Safety Monitor (free) - Registry change warning
9. File Checker (free) - Monitors important ".exe" files of various programs
10. Mozilla Firefox (free) - Safer Web Browser - try some of the exploit tests in the "Polls" section here at Wilders, it's scary stuff, enough to have most people looking for better solutions...
11. Proxomitron (free) - With Kye-U's filters installed
12. Ewido (free) - anti-trojan
13. For email - Mozilla Thunderbird (free) - I don't use it because I only have Hotmail.
14. Netgear ProSafe Firewall - Hardware firewall.

The above will give you a fairly tight system. Ultimately it comes down to safe practices, still, it is always best to practice and think of safety, otherwise it will remind you and it won’t hold back in doing so... it's a bit like gravity, very unforgiving...

Hope this helps...

Cheers