Recommend an AV

I have to setup an old laptop for my little cousin. She's 9 and only really wants it to look at whatever 9 year olds look at on the internet.

It's quite old, I mean it's one of my old laptops that was at the bottom of a wardrobe for a few years.

Specs are:

550mhz Celeron
64mb RAM
9GB HDD

OS is Windows 2000.

Can anyone recommend an AV for this?

 

take a look at eset, avira,kaspersky or dr web all are easy on memory and may work good.

 

Personally i'd install her avast! and set ALL providers to Silent Mode (with answer "No"). This way avast! will automatically block or remove malicious files and store them into quarantine (avast! Chest). Plus it's free and relatively light when set to Normal sensitivity level. Others are either payable or require user interaction which, considering she is just 9, that isn't what you'd expect from her. You may also lock it down with password to prevent accidental or intentional disabling of avast!. Imo a perfect solution when setting protection for users where you don't expect they'll know what to do on virus detection.

 

I agree with avast!, but there are only three providers with the option to have Silent Mode, right? The others... I dunno... just work?

 

another vote for Eset or Avira, although Eset runs lighter on my systems than Avira, I know of other people that say Avira is lighter on their systems. Try them both. As suggested KAV and Dr. Web can run light as well, but neither are lighter than Eset or Avira on my systems.

 

Network Shield works in silent mode anyway, Standard Shield, Web Shield, Internet Mail and MS Outlook/Exchange have option for Silent Mode while IM and P2P providers take parent setting from Standard Shield. If Standard Shield is set to Silent Mode, that will also apply to IM and P2P Shields automatically.

 

KAV doesn't support W2000 anymore, with the latest version at least. I would definitely do a custom install with whatever you install and get rid of any bells/whistles, and leave it with the bare file scanner+proactive protection if it has any- mail/http/etc checkers would just bring that machine to it's knees.

 

I'm not sure which AVs support Windows 2000.
64 MB RAM is very little. Would an expansion to 256 or 512 MB RAM be possible ?

I've trialled some AVs mentioned on av-comparatives.

I've found Avira to be very light, and not everyone is bothered by false positives. It's possible to lower the heuristic settings, and thus decrease the false positives. The Avira webpage does not seem to address memory requirements for Windows 2000 , so I'm not sure if it's possible. Downside of Avira is that it supossedly isn't good at cleaning infections.

Eset's memory requirements seem to be feasible, but even then very little RAM is left.

It's difficult to come up with good AVs that can deal with the limited resources.

Maybe a non-AV setup is a good alternative ? I don't have any good suggestions though.

Just one more thing: no AV will protect the computer for a 9 year old who is a happy clicker and knows little to nothing about the risks, like clicking on advertisements, rogue software, spam emails, unpatched applications etc.
Such social engineering methods can be mitigated by a more powerful security setup, but I don't see how that is feasible with that CPU and RAM.

To be honest, I don't know if your cousin can be safe on a resource-poor computer. Also taking into account the lack of knowledge about risks, especially the social engineering type. Maybe parental controls/filtering would be useful ? I don't know of any program that can do that and run on that computer.

To be honest, I don't think that the average 9 old should be able to access the internet without restrictions and/or supervision. There are real risks.

 

Hey there,

Look, every user at Wilders is going to give you his/her personal recommendation based on what works on his/her system. Thus, any recommendation your read here is going to be biased, prejudiced, etc.

There is a search link at the right top part of this page where you can search old and recent topics about the experiences people here have had with several AV's.
By reading those threads, they might help you to make up your mind.
But don't forget this, even when many users here may be running Windows XP or Windows Vista, that not necessarily means that all PC/laptops configurations are going to be exactly the same. That in the end would depend on what you have running on your system.

Many threads here that start with some kind of topic like this one and end up LOCKED [ I prefer to use LOCKED instead of “closed” ] because in the end the user A is going to recommend anti-virus ABC and the user B is going to recommend anti-virus XYZ and that prompts an argument the leads nowhere.

Best regards,

Carlos

 

If people don't go offtopic and don't compare them which has yet to happen here this thread could continue on for a long time.

 

Then whats the point of this forum if we aren't allowed to compare anything to anything. They can just close the forum in that case.
If you give valid arguments why something might be better than the other for the case given i see no reason to lock that.
I could recommend him AVIRA but since he'll be installing it for 9 year old girl, i seriously doubt that she'll know what to do when virus alert pops up.
So avast! makes a perfect choice for that when set to Silent Mode and is also free. CIS 3.9 might be an option too, considering she's probably not going to install exra programs (CIS set into password protected mode).
And then there are payable ones that in general decide on what to do by themself, but they are of course payable which i again doubt hes interested into paying, neither that girl is.
Another thing is when someone says NOD32 rocks, Kaspersky sucks and thats it.

 

Currently Dr.Web AV only with mail guard disabled is using ~11mb of memory. You can configure it to not show any balloons, alerts and configure it to automatically/silently remove viruses if anything is detected. It does support even back to Win95.

 

I would say a realtime av with just the standard guard (all free av's can do this with a custom install) some paid av's can as well.
and K9 web protection If possible create a standard user account.
In what ever setup you decide I think K9 should be used.

 

Thanks, man - appreciated.

 

Instead of an AV, you might consider setting up Sandboxie or even Defensewall for her on this old laptop.

Both easy to use and virtually no pop-ups.

 

Correct.

The key thing is to present a reasoned argument (versus providing an unsupported declarative statement).

As stated elsewhere,

The original poster provided a framework in which to provide an answer. Develop an answer reflective of that framework (young user, old laptop, Win2k OS, low RAM available), and the discussion can proceed.

Blue

 

If the lass is on a broadband connection, then I suggest Prevx. It is feather light, fast, unobtrusive. effective.

 

That would actually make a lot of sense here... does PX support w2k?

 

yup
http://www.prevx.com/freescan.asp

 

No need to panic here. The OP could configure her avira to work at fully automatic mode to deal with malware, without user intervention (repair and delete options selected for primary and secondary actions, respectively, and ticking the 'copy file to quarantine' box first, just in case). Of course, only the 'main' Guard module should be installed, according to her current setup.

 

Yes, in payable version. Will she pay for it or will he pay for her?
I usually don't pay for others, thats why i usually opt for free versions unless i say to them: "Well you can also check out payable AVIRA, Kaspersky or NOD32 etc"...

 

Well, the OP didn't mention that he wanted a 'free' AV

Another plus for the paid version

 

Well, how much use is it to install an AV software that probably costs more than this entire system?

 

If the money (and an old system) is the problem, I would recommend him Avast! Free as well without hesitation, because of its extended configurability (in this specific case)

 

Yes, avast! Home Edition can be configured to work without user intervention through its so-called Silent Mode. Combine that with the "No sound"-option and you got a "silent, but deadly" setup.