NAV Or PC-cillin?

Hello everyone. This has been very interesting for me. I am learning some things I didn't know. Thanks to all of you for that.

I think I will trial one more AV before I make my decision. I'm going to give McAfee VS7(don't laugh) a try. I'm still leaning towards PCC, but want to try McAfee out.

Just a little side bar. I don't want to bash NAV. It has served me well for three years. I just don't understand why NAV doesn't update their virus defs everyday like most of the top AVs do. Instead they just do it once a week. I know you can download them from their Intelligent Updater, but that's an extra step I feel I shouldn't have to do. JMHO.

 

I don't think anyone here will laugh.

Mac is a pretty darn good av...!

 

Hobnob.
You was worried that NAV only updates once a week or so.
The same goes for Mcafee.
They do have daily dats, but they are a little tricky to use, for me anyway.
If something serious happens, both vendors will provide extra updates, so the once in a week " in peacetime" shouldnt worry you.
And as Jim IT said, no one laughs.
McAfee is an excellent AV.
Regards
Ole

 

Hello all. Well I did my trial of McAfee VS7. It was ok, but I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I am still leaning towards a change to PCC.

Does NAV have a "Real" memory scanner or is it a pretender?

 

NAV has no real memory scanner (I don't know if it pretends to have one... )

At the moment, I'm only aware of a few _ATs_ with proper memory scanner: TDS-3, Trojan Hunter, Boclean (sorry, if I forgot one)

 

Thanks anvil. I've decided to give one more AV a try. I'm going to trial KAV lite. I've heard good things about it, so I thought I would give it a try. I'll probably install it later on today.

 

Hi,

if you like a scanner which offers daily updates an a very, very good engine, so take Kaspersky (Lite or Personal).

But: While testing, never run several AntiVirus tools at the same time, cause it will at least slow down you system!

Regards,
Markus

 

Hi Markus. Yep, I do only run one AV at a time. It's sort of a hassle uninstalling and installing but it's the only way to do it.

 

Hi everyone. Just want to do an update. Not sure if anyone is really interested but.............

I know I have been all over the place here, but decided to post in this thread because this is where I started. I think.

After trying out a few AVs and asking questions I have come to a decission on a AV. I am going with PC-cillin 2003. Although it had a lot to do with what I felt comfortable with, I also kept going back to JimIT and Tassie_Devils' responses. They helped me out a great deal and I thank them.

So that's it. The quest is over.

Thanks to everyone else who added there suggestions and knowledge.

 

In my opinion Pc-Cillin is a VERY decent antivirus. I am not currently using it but would have no problems using it if I had to. I used Pc-Cillin in the past but left it, not because of the product itself, but because of the company. My system has only ever contracted three viruses and Pc-cillin nailed each one instantly. Also, I recently read an article somewhere on the Internet where they compared the major, better known antivirus, and Pc-cillin had by far the least impact on System Resources, in that area they really were number one. Good luck.

Acadia

 

Hey, you're welcome!

I think you made a great choice!

 

Hi Hobnob... Well you finally settled on an AV.

Good going! At least you can say you tried some others and had a choice.

Now, the only thing left [if you already have not done so] is to get yourself a dedicated AT program, TDS, Trojan Hunter. Give those a trial [although with TDS you cannot get auto update, has to be manual, and "Execution Protection" option [Real Time Protection of each executable] is unavailable..... But plenty of tests, scanning abilities are available..

Here is a nice link for TDS3 [as stated previously, have not tried Trojan Hunter myself].

http://tds.diamondcs.com.au/ TDS3 Home Page.

and... here at Wilders is a nice TDS3 Configuration courtesy of FanJ!

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=2871

Reviews: http://www.anti-trojan-software-reviews.com/

I had more, but am sure the TDS3 home page will have some reviews listed there.

EDIT: Found others on home page: http://www.vanish.org/security/trojans.htm

also: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/trojans/tr-tests.htm



Cheers, TAS...

 

Hi Tassie_Devils. I had it down to three ATs. TrojanHunter which I've trialed and TDS3 and BOClean. Since there is no trial version of BOClean, I will give TDS3 a try first. Thanks for the links.

Again, thanks for all the help.

 

I have PCCillin 2003 and I really liked it too until about two weeks ago when I and several others discovered a VERY irritating bug which Trend Micro has confirmed. I spent over an hour on the phone, on July 23, with an engineer discussing it. The really irritating thing was that I had this problem for two months and was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what was causing it and I never thought it could be my av until I happened on a post at DSLR where the poster commented that he had to get rid of PCC recently because of the very problem I was having! So, I then Googled and found another person who happened to be the first person to report the bug to Trend Micro a few weeks ago. Trend, at first, laughed at both these persons and denied that PCC was the cause.

The bug is in tmproxy.exe. This is new in the 2003 version along with WebTrap. After a certain number of hours without a reboot, tmproxy becomes corrupted somehow and you begin to get not only 400, 404, 501, etc. errors in your browser but you get sent to strange websites, rather than the one you requested and graphics become corrupted also. I was frequently getting a Microsoft POP3 email server which would complain loudly that I had not entered the proper commands within the time limit! Huh? I was mystified by these errors. I even got internal errors at websites when I would click on a new thread in a forum I would instead get Google although dslreports would be in the address bar! Weird stuff like that. Sometimes rapid clicking would get me to the right site, but eventually the errors would be constant and I would be forced to reboot and then the errors would be gone for a number hours and then they would start again. I got so many apache servers complaining that I, as the admin, (huh? I'm not an admin at any of these sites!) had not entered the proper commands that i was getting sick of it all and was really worried about my computer! I had called my ISP and Dell and they were mystified. I had searched for viruses but found none and was getting desperate when I finally learned what was causing this awful problem.

Trend Micro immediately acknowledged the problem when I called them thanks to the perserverance of the person I found by Googling who had the problem. The engineer told me that tmproxy.exe should be disabled in MSCONFIG startup and the file should be renamed so that it cannot run even after virus pattern updates. You can also remove it from the registry for good measure. The engineer said that when a patch is made that we would be notified by email. I got the impression though that Trend may not patch this because version 2004 will be in beta soon and they may wait to fix it in 2004 version.

You don't really need tmproxy.exe. It is used for scanning webmail accounts so if you don't have any of those then no problem in disabling. Even if you do, and I do, you can just rely on the resident scanner to catch any nasties. I don't use anything but the resident scanner in an av anyway. Had I realized exactly what tmproxy.exe was for I would have disabled it long ago out of principle as I never needed it as I feel an av's resident scanner is sufficient.
(I have always had the email scanner disabled and the registry key removed because PCC email scanner cannot be used with Road Runner and many other ISP's).


Edited to say that the Trend engineer told me (after I requested several times that he do this) that this bug, and the temporary workaround, will be posted on the Trend site because anyone who doesn't reboot (or shut down) often will be affected by the bug, but I haven't seen it posted there yet.

 

Oh man this is not what I wanted to hear. My PCC 2003 CD is due to arrive Tue., Aug 5th.

I ran the trial version for awhile and didn't notice any of the problems that you described. Don't know what OS you are running, but mine is XP Home. Don't know if that would make a difference.

Geeez, I'm gonna be really upset if I start having problems after putting down the $$ for PCC. I really liked eveything about it while using the trial version.

I've decided not to even think about it. Everyone else here seems to think it is a very good A/V. It was highly recommended. I'm gonna go with that.

 

I'm sorry! But I thought you needed to know. The woman who is credited with discovering this bug has XP. The poster at DSLR who reported it to Trend about the same time but who wasn't persistent like she was in getting Trend to look into it has W98SE. She was under the impression that part of the problem was a conflict between Zone Alarm and PCC 2003. She has used PCC for many years and never had a problem until this mess. I'm reasonably sure (and so was the engineer that I spoke with) that ZA has nothing to do with this because I don't have ZA or any firewall...but then maybe it is problem with only one version of ZA conflicting with PCC on XP but not W98SE. The engineer said they have had reports from users of all OSes with this problem, but obviously not everyone using PCC has the problem. Trend is trying to isolate why some users have the problem and others don't. (Of course those moderate to heavy users who reboot at least once a day or more or those who use the computer lightly during a 24 hour period before reboot won't have the problem anyhow).

I also have a license for NOD32 which I had stopped using when I was beta testing it because I found a nasty bug in it and I had started using PCC and been using it for around six months. I didn't have this problem until about two months...maybe three... ago. It was shortly after an engine upgrade by Trend for W98 users that I started having the problem. XP users didn't get an upgrade though yet this woman has XP. So, I think perhaps that Trend updated tm.proxy for all OSes and that is the cause otherwise we should have all had this problem from time we got PCC 2003 and we haven't.

Anyhow, back to what I wanted to say about NOD32. Rather than do the workaround for PCC, I decided to try the release version of NOD32 and I've been using it for about 2 weeks now and what a relief! Not a single browser error, not a single corrupted graphic and and not a single strange web page! I usually reboot before I go to bed and now I can go that long or much, much longer if I want without all those weird problems. I really hated having to reboot when I had several instances of Ping Plotter running gathering data and a lot of tabs open on Mozilla. That was a real pain in the butt.

To look on the bright side, if you don't mind rebooting often I noticed the amount of time elapsing before the corruption affected browsing varied. It depended directly on how much I used the computer that day so it is something to do with the tmproxy screwing up DNS which apparantly is cached in the proxy and the longer you go without a reboot the more corrupted the cache becomes. Rebooting clears the cache and solves the problem...for awhile. Of course, with XP one advantage to it over W98SE is that you don't have to reboot very often so I doubt you are very enthusiastic about needing to reboot your XP like it is an unstable W98 or ME system.

You know, Trend is very nice and phone support is good although the quality varies from engineer to engineer. Maybe you will be lucky and won't be affected or maybe somehow the corruption comes after you have used the software for several months...if so, then Trend would have a permanent fix by the time it would bother you. I'm sure Trend will refund your money if you want. Or if it happens to you, you can apply the workaround as you really don't need tmproxy.exe. You will still be able to use the POP3 scanner (my not using the POP3 scanner is not because of this problem but for other reasons). So, even if this affects you...it's not that awful....especially since you know now what to expect. The worst part was trying to figure out what was causing these errors.

 

Thanks for all the information Mele20. I do appreciate it. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful in my last post. It was pretty late here when I read your post and wrote mine. I think I was getting a little rummy by that time. When I read your post about the problems with PCC, I thought oh no I screwed up. I was more upset with myself than anything esle. I kept thinking I should have done more research.

I've been trialing a few A/Vs, Extendia AVK, Panda Platinum, PCC and KAV. Nothing technical on my part. I just wanted something I felt comfortable with, worked smoothly on my computer and had good virus detection. I never tried NOD32. Maybe I should have. It came down to Extendia AVK and PCC 2003. I decided to go with PCC because of what I heard about their tech support. Believe me, Extendia AVK's tech support (Boomerang) is very bad.

Oh well, I ordered PCC through Amazon.com and they offered a $25 rebate. So if it doesn't work out, I'm not out that much.

Thanks again Mele20 for the information.

 

That's ok. I too would be upset if I heard something like this right after I had bought the product.

I think you hit the nail on the head though about tech support. I left NAV (after two years of being very happy with NAV2001) because Symantec moved the tech support to India (both online and paid phone) and it became terrible. I gather Symantec provides very little training. Plus, there is the language problem as the accents are rather heavy (if you have phone support) and hard to understand and web support is poor partly because they don't understand slang and idiomatic usage of English and have trouble expressing themselves just using the language in ordinary ways.

I think Trend's free phone support (in the US and Canada) is the best support of all av vendors. The support is out of California which is even better. I really don't see how they can afford to do it. Of course, the renewal fee each year is higher than that of many av so maybe that is how they can afford free phone support.

I will probably use PCC again even if I have to do the round about fix and the reasons will be because the PCC GUI is the best I've seen (except for NAV) and because of the phone support. Plus, for me on W98SE, PCC is among the lowest on resource usage. I was also impressed when this engineer asked me what security sites I frequent. I told him my home site (DSLR) and he said that Trend would start monitoring there. They have had no official representation there whereas Symantec has 6 employees that monitor. Perhaps, in the future they will monitor here too. So, I do think that even with this yucky bug that you made a good choice.

 

Well I received my PCC CD today. I installed it but I can't register it. When I click on the Register Now button, a window opens asking me for my "old license key". I don't have an old license key. I don't have any license key. I have the serial #. As a matter of fact I have two. Both start with for letters and have 16 numbers. I can't figure out what the problem is. The instructions say if the license key doesn't appear on the Register Now screen I should copy it for the Web page. What web page? This if very frustrating.

 

Hobnob,

I haven't had this problem, but Trend can help you with this. The license key should appear on the web page presented from Trend after you hit the Register Now button. If it doesn't, they can probably e-mail it to you.

At any rate, I would definitely e-mail Trend for help.

Keep us posted.

 

JimIT

First let me say that I purchased this PCC 2003 CD from Amazon.com. They had a good deal with a rebate. Maybe not worth it. We will see.

I contacted Trend Mirco tech support by phone. I was told that the serial # that was with the CD is registered to someone else. Can you believe that! Trend Micro couldn't issue a new serial # because I purchased PCC from Amazon.

I contacted Amazon's customer service. She was very nice. Said she never heard of anything like this happening before. Do I believe her? They will ship out a replacement CD, one day air at no charge. Hopefully this one will not be registered to someone else.

 

Wow! That is some tale. I've been leery of buying at Amazon now I will be even more so. Nice though that she is sending it by overnight air at no extra charge. Let's hope it is ok.

 

We use amazon.com all the time and have never had 1 problem. Reckon I better knock on wood.

I have PC cillin 2003 on XP Pro and 2k Pro and have had good experiances there too.

 

It is some kind of story isn't it? This was my first experience with Amazon.com. It's not a confidence builder that for sure. Hopefully things will be straightened out and I can enjoy my PCC.

You are right. Trend Micro has great tech support. They were very helpful over the phone. And no long wait on hold.

I will keep everyone updated on what happens.

Hi dom424. I wrote the above before I saw your post. It's nice to hear you've had a good experience with Amazon.com. Hopefully this was just a fluke. They did seem sincere when apologizing for the inconvenience they caused.

 

Hey Hobnob

Are you sure they did not send you one of their USED copies of PCC they had lying about?

Never heard of this situation before.

Keep us all posted.