On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:01:03 -0700, "Loki-uk"
AVG catches 56% of virii and Avast isn't much better spend the money and buy
NAV or some other commercial AV product it's the one thing thats worth it.
Blind faith in retail feeware is misplaced. "Norton" contains
commercial malware, in the form of product activation that will deny
you service if it "thinks" you are breaking their license terms.
That's user-hostile at the best of times, but unforgivable in the
context of malware defence. What if you have to manually chase
unknown stealth files, and break Norton's vandorware by mistake?
Also if you want a good Anti-Spyware program you can get Webroot's Spysweeper
v cheap through the shareware (is it WUGNET) section of microsoft.com
Feeware av may or may not be worth the money, but rarely are feeware
scanners for commercial malware (cm) as good as the free stallwarts
AdAware, Spybot and MS's AntiSpyware Beta. In fact, there's a swathe
of feeware anti-cm that is bogus; typically they false-positive like
crazy, demand payment before they will clean, and still let through
their vendor's buddyware anyway.
It's weak on bots, and like most av, misses many or most commercial
malware. For the latter, you need dedicated scanners, preferably more
than one, though you should allow only one or none to run underfoot.
That's going to be true for any av that is trying to tackle malware
that is already running.
If you want to spend money, I'd consider Kaspersky (best reputation
for effectiveness), NOD32 (lightest on resources, so good for older
PCs), and anything that offers a bootable solution for formally
scanning NTFS. Few if any do.
I'd spend no money on anti-cm scanners.
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