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Another reason to drop Kaspersky?

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tranglos:
This reminds me of this thread from a week or so ago...
-Darwin (September 17, 2010, 05:49 PM)
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Totally.

tomos:
tomos - I still have a 3 machine license for VIPRE Premium and overall like it. However, I'm running MS Security Essentials on all but my own computer and MS Security Essentials seems fine to me.
[...]
[off-topic]Hope you are well![/off-topic]
-Darwin (September 17, 2010, 03:38 PM)
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Yeah, I'm starting to feel like why should I pay for something that just doesnt work so well - and from the comments lately, people are complaining about all the antivirus apps including the one that have been popular over the last few years with those 'in the know'. I complained about Avira (paid) elsewhere here

PS I'm very well thanks!  :)

superboyac:
Yes, I'm interested in all of this also.  I'd love to get rid of Kaspersky if I could find a good way to do it.  My computer runs significantly faster without it.  But what is the solution?  It catches things often enough where I would be uncomfortable having no AV program at all.  I've even thought about just disabling everything and only running a scan once a night, after I go to bed.  I don't see too many problems with that, but it won't stop a "live" virus.  I don't know.  I would love to hear about AV software alternatives.  And, no, I don't mean things like "I am so careful and knowledgeable that I don't even need an AV.  I just never put myself in that position."

No, I want solutions for normal people.  We are going to do bad things and get viruses.  What is the best way to deal with it?  What's the alternative to having an AV program running constantly?

tranglos:
I've even thought about just disabling everything and only running a scan once a night, after I go to bed.  I don't see too many problems with that, but it won't stop a "live" virus.  I don't know.  -superboyac (September 20, 2010, 08:47 AM)
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I've been thinking along the same lines. The unknown here is how hard it may be to remove an infection - during that nightly scan - once it's already on the system. Years ago I understood what viruses did - from writing messages to screen to clobbering the MBR. I knew the difference between viruses, worms and trojans.

But now? Do the "old-school" viruses still exist at all? Can a virus overwrite MBR under Windows 7? (I doubt that!) Or are they all trojans now really, mostly designed to intercept sensitive data like passwords and send them home somewhere? Truth be told, I no longer quite understand the difference between AV software like Kaspersky and anti-malware like MalwareBytes.

When choosing a backup regime, the thing to do is start with deciding what you want to protect and from exactly what risks. Same here, I think: what exactly are we trying to guard ourselves against? What threats, what infection scenarios? What do viruses do these days?

superboyac:
Years ago I understood what viruses did - from writing messages to screen to clobbering the MBR. I knew the difference between viruses, worms and trojans.
-tranglos (September 20, 2010, 09:03 AM)
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Yeah, that's a good point.  I don't know.
Around 2000, the lab I was working in got a virus on one of the computers.  I noticed it because the computer had a bunch of mp3 files, and each mp3 file all of a sudden had a duplicate file with some other weird extension.  I checked it out with an AV, and it was a virus sure enough.  It got cleaned and that was that.  But it had spread throughout the entire drive--every mp3 file was duplicated.

Around the same time, I got a pretty nasty virus on my home pc.  My technogeek roommate was able to fix it using some dos methods, which was really amazing to me at the time.  It was a bad virus--I couldn't even start up my computer...probably an MBR virus?

But now, they don't really do that.  My sister and mom got a virus, and it was from facebook.  I don't really know what it did, but it prevented programs from running, lots of popups.  The bad thing was you couldn't run any exe files, the task manager was disabled.

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