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AntiVirus with decent anti-spyware (realtime) detection

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Josh:
To all,

I have seen this talked about several times on these forums, but I am attempting to solicit opinions of different products from various people. I am currently evaluating VIPRE (By Sunbelt) which is an antivirus with antispyware built in (as almost all a/v's have nowadays). I am liking it, but before I buy it, I want to hear opinions of others I should try. I am thinking of trialing webroot's a/v & a/s. I wasted my money on a 3 year subscription to lavasoft adaware, which has failed me 3 times in the last 2 weeks, and as such I am going to contact them and force them to refund my money. The product touts it's ad watch program as a decent realtime protection system, but it fails everytime I've used it. Now, they might argue that I should have used the trial, but I am not going to install spyware on my system just to test a product in the case that it fails.

So, what antivirus programs have you all used which come with a good anti-spyware module providing realtime protection?

Let me know and thanks!

Josh

Darwin:
Well... after a weird situation last night wherein Maxthon froze and I could not terminate the process because my system had apparently locked it, I disabled my wireless receiver, rebooted and ran a Deep scan with Webroot overnight - I have no idea how long it took, but typically these scans take about 2 hours (I run them once a week over dinner). It found one trojan in a very old e-mail attachment (from 2000! It was a file that allowed me to run Combat Flight Simulator without the CD in the drive) and I let it quarantine it (in the past I'd just directed my AV to ignore it). Because I was paranoid, I then installed VIPRE and set up my preferences for it and rebooted. I let VIPRE update its definitions and then disabled Webroot while I set VIPRE to deep scan my system. After an hour and a half of watching it trawl through my C drive (hadn't even gotten to My Documents, which are on E:) I killed it and looked at the one issue it had found. It had identified Check&Get.exe as a keylogger. I investigated, and also scanned the file with Webroot, and as far as I can tell, it's clean. Anyway, I was disappointed with the speed of VIPRE and with the false positive. My assumption is that it gets quicker with each run (this was my experience with Win2k, before that machine gave up the ghost). For my needs, Webroot is rock solid. If you are happy with VIPRE and you've been runing it for a while you're probably beyond that break in period and it's probably very quick. I'd stick with it. The price is significantly cheaper than Webroot at the moment and I WAS impressed with how responsive my computer was even when running the deep scan. Webroot is more resource intensive during scanning, but it is quick. EDIT: Also, I followed up the aborted deep scan with VIPRE with a Quick Scan with VIPRE and it took about 10 minutes or so - not bad! It also didn't turn up the keylogger false-positive, which I thought rather odd...

NB my wife is running VIPRE Enterprise on my work provided notebook and it is amazingly quick and non-intrusive on that machine (WinXP Pro Sp-3, 2GB RAM). If I didn't have just under two years remaining on my Webroot licence I'd probably stick with VIPRE to get a better idea of how it would perform on this machine in the long run.

Bottom line: I think Webroot is great, but many disagree. Carol, for example, has had negative experiences with it WRT resource utilization. VIPRE is impressive considering it's still only about two months old. I am sure that it will get better. If you are determined to give something else a shot before you commit, do give Webroot a try. Otherwise, I'd take advantage of the great price on VIPRE...

[Darwin returns to gazing at his navel while sitting on the fence!]

EDITED: for clarity.

Josh:
Thank you for the reply darwin. Did you have any other issues with VIPRE? I am going to give webroot a try and just disable VIPRE. I will let you know my results. Have you attempted another deep scan to see if its sped up?

Darwin:
No, I just uninstalled it (I have current licences for both Bitdefender and AVG that I'm not using and the two licences for Webroot. I don't even want to be tempted to spend more money at the moment)! The only other issues I am aware of relate to the performance of SBAMsvc.exe. Occasionally it will freak out and crash a machine. It has done this once to my wife's work computer (a notebook she uses at home a lot). It was in the course of investigating this issue that I becamse aware of VIPRE.

One thing that annoyed me about VIPRE is that it doesn't tell you where the virus/spam/malware/trojan that it finds is located until you complete the scan. Also, if you cancel a scan, it clears the items that it discovered up to that point (so you have to re-run the scan to correct any issues AND you have to let the scan finish). Webroot retains the "found items" if you cancel the scan, letting you deal with them (though I should note that it won't tell you the location until the scan is completed or aborted, either).

With Webroot, I've disabled the check on system start feature (see screenshot) and it STILL takes a long time to load with considerable resource hit, just to warn you. Once it's loaded, though, it's very non-intrusive.

AntiVirus with decent anti-spyware (realtime) detection

cmpm:
Check out Eset.
It has a trial period of 30 days.

http://www.eset.com/

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