What is your security setup these days?

Yeah, I remember when it started to get bloated, it was depressing to me. I loved that it was light and just did the job of an AV and not try to do things better suited to other apps (outbound FW's/HIPS/etc...). Not only because it's lighter this way but less potential for conflict. There's nothing more irritating when trying out a new AV than seeing it say you have to uninstall basically every other security product you have first due to conflicts. The old versions of Avira Free never had that problem. They played nicely with everything else I had.

Just resident file protection on the free version, and web scanning on a paid version... and that's all that's needed IMO. Leave the rest to other apps. That was their M.O. back in the day and it was a bad idea to change it and try to be like everyone else IMO. Instead of shiny new toys use your time improving your engine, keeping your detection top notch, hardening it from termination and keeping it light. And you have the peace of mind of knowing it'll play nicely with other security apps which is a huge advantage over much of it's competition. Because let's face it, these days nobody is going to uninstall their firewalls, HIPS, sandboxes, or boot to restore apps for an AV. Heck, I wouldn't even trade a hosts file for one.

 

Without a driver installed for a device, Windows can not use it, it does not know how to - it needs the driver software to tell it how to use it.

Even if there are these backdoors within Windows, they can't access the camera without the driver installed for it. The microphone is a different matter I guess, unless you want to uninstall your audio driver and be without sound.

 

Really, with the little info we have on backdoors, how do we know their capabilities? And you forgot to consider the firmware of either the computer or the camera itself again.

 

They can use it without turning the light on. I don't have the article offhand but if you Google it you can find info on it. Given the recent reveal of hardware taps and backdoors I would not be satisfied with just uninstalling the drivers. Tape maybe overkill, but it is effective and easy.

 

You made an interesting point that I've been thinking about. Probably the lighter scans are targeted towards the more vulnerable areas, in fact some programs allow you to choose how thorough you want the scan to be. I don't remember seeing it discussed anywhere, but maybe test results would show a difference in detection rates depending on the depth of the scan.

 

In a post or two I was commenting on ESET being more noticeable than WSA. I've been having some hangs lately (with or without ESET installed) and have been removing software to find the problem. This latest install of ESET now seems as light on my computer as WSA did, so the slow-down I was experiencing was from a conflict between other software.

 

I will have a look for that, I didn't know it was possible to use the camera without the led lighting up. I am certain that camera can't be used without the correct driver installed, so in my opinion nothing to worry about there. However, of course it is a concern if the camera can be activated with the led staying off. My old Compal HEL80 has a cover for the camera lens which you manually have to slide to expose the camera, but I've never seen this on any other laptops. I've always liked it because it keeps the camera free of dust and fingerprints.

 

After having used eset , wsa , panda and avast in the past few days i can definetly say eset is the lightest on my system - much lighter than wsa !

 

I agree, In the past few days i've tried WSA and Baidu and ESET runs smoother and lighter than both plus they caused some problems...ESET+ERP runs great for me so I suppose i'll just stick with that until maybe voodooshield gets updated.

 

I'd have to say of the two, Eset and WSA, WSA runs the lightest. I'm using Eset at the moment it sometimes startup lags a little in the beginning. Never had that issue with WSA.

 

Finally Got Panda Cloud to completely work on my machine (URL Filter included) turns out their Filtering service cannot run properly with K9 installed dunno why i didnt think of that earlier But I'm happy now because I've been wanting to use this AV for awhile now and I have to be honest, I'm not disappointed so far

 

Going back to what works well....CFW, Sandboxie and 360 IS. Also added MBAM anti-exploit. Man that thing runs light.

 

I'm still enjoying OA+Avast combo. It's going to be a keeper on my laptopie. There was the only prob that once Avast service went berserk and got 50% cpu. After logoff it got fixed.

 

I upgraded ESET Nod32 AV to ESET Smart Security. I like it so far

 

tomaz is it free to upgrade from an antivirus to security suite?ofcourse if i have a licence for an antivirus from esset

 

Nope it is not Free to upgrade from NOD32 to ESS

 

No it's not free but you only pay the difference in price for remaining subscription time.

 

SweX thank you

 

tomazyk how do i do that?

 

Added SecureAPlus to my setup.

 

I've used my EAV key on ESS and Vise Versa and it worked fine

 

Yes, in which the extra features are irrelevant for typical home users protection like PC tune-up utilities.

The market disagree though. Most people just want an all-in-one solution. And they are happy to see their product of choice to have a long list of features, with some them not even knowing what those features do. That's why AVs are still popular while more exotic standalone security apps have to face though reality in selling their products.

 

Sure, the average user wants simplicity. I was referring to the types of people in here that are more informed, and realize the benefit of using layers and not putting all your eggs into 1 proverbial basket. Sadly you're right though, we are the minority and they will cater to the masses, hence why I'm unhappy with the current state of AV's.

 

Well I contacted the company that sells Eset in my country and they arranged everything.

 

As far as I know, you can use ESS key to instal EAV, but not the other way around. At least that was the case few years ago... I don't know if they've changed it, but I really doubt it.