Special User Sections > What's the Best?
Anti-Virus Package
JavaJones:
EZ Antivirus (eTrust) was mentioned several times earlier. We use it in my office on all our machines and it works great. Low resource use and no viruses in 3 or 4 years of use there. But most there aren't heavy users either.
Honestly I think it's pretty hard to pick a single winner or even a top 3 or something when there's so much variation between choices. First off there's so many different criteria. That most recently posted ranking had NOD32 way down the list, presumably for interface or cost reasons, but if you took into account performance, Kaspersky would surely not have been number one (rank 5). So first it depends on what criteria you take into account.
The other thing is that there are very few particularly accurate tests done on this stuff! You have to ask what the testing organization is using as test material, whether they are scanning only infected files (but not an infected machine, if that makes any sense), or whether they're actually purposefully infecting a machine with an active virus. That's a huge thing because a virus embedded in say a .dll that doesn't get activated should be cleaned easily by most antivirus programs. The real trick is whether it will continue working and properly clean an infection after it occurs. This is the hardest thing to deal with I think. I recently had to clean off a customer's machine that was totally riddled with viruses and it took no less than 6 security programs, from NOD32 (trial) to Ewido anti-trojan, several online scanners (bit defender, etc.), spybot, adaware, and other anti-spyware apps, etc. And eventually I still had to get in there and manually delete some stuff with Unlocker. It was messy. :D Now you may ask how a properly protected system would get to that state? Well, let's say someone accidentally (or stupidly) turns off their antivirus, or it crashes, or what have you. The circumstances are rare, but they're worth considering.
Also it might be worth distinguishing between which is a good *detection* system and which is a good *cleaning* system. A lot of apps can detect many viruses but not necessarily clean them all for example.
In any case properly reviewing and ranking A/V software is tricky. :D
P.S. I personally use AVG and have been very happy with it. No problems in 3 or 4 years of use. I've used Avast in the past but I frankly hate its skinned interface and which they just shipped with a bog standard simple one. I haven't tried Antivir for quite some time but apparently it's the best of the lot for pure detection.
- Oshyan
rjbull:
I see that CompuServe use ClamAV, which is Unix-based GPL software. Windows ports are coming, more details at http://www.clamav.net/binary.html#pagestart
superboyac:
I think this category (antivirus programs) will be a very difficult one to review, partly because it's difficult (and risky) to have more than one program installed on a machine at a time. And the installing/uninstalling of the programs is not always the simplest process. So whoever is (will) review these will need some help from those of us using the different programs, like this thread is doing already.
I'll give my input on the ones I've tried. Years ago, I used to use Norton (before I was picky). But when the bloat bothered me, I looked for another one. So after Norton, I tried a few products like Kaspersky, F-Secure, F-Prot, Panda, Avast, McAfee...I think that's it.
Norton sucks, as most of us know. They have a Corporate edition that my old company used to use, which actually wasn't bad. But it's not for consumers like us.
Kaspersky is good, it's what I use now. It can be a little resource heavy compared to others, but not enough to annoy me yet. Before I knew about it, what intrigued me about it was that it was universally agreed that it had the best detection method. The current version cleaned up the interface and made it more user-friendly (and a little lighter on resources if I'm not mistaken). The interface is still a little complex for the uninitiated user, but I have no problem with it. I mean, you can't have tons of features and still keep the interface super-simple. Another thing I like about Kaspersky is the feedback you get of what it's doing. There's a live log window and statistics for every little thing, and I love that.
F-Secure was my alternative to Kaspersky in case it ever got too resource hungry. Scot Finnie picked F-Secure as his AV of choice, discussed in this DC thread:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=4652.0
F-secure is nice. It's more user friendly than Kaspersky, and for all practical purposes, just as effective in detections. The reason I like Kaspersky better is because F-Secure doesn't offer as much feedback and statistics. It kind of just does the job (well, I might add) but only notifies you if bad things happen. In Kaspersky, you can see a log of every file it scans, the result of the scan, and other information. I like that, because I'm very nosy. F-Secure also installs something like 12 processes, which freaks some people out, but I never noticed it affecting my machine's performance.
F-Prot is a program I tried once because it sounded like F-Secure. It turned out to be decent. The interface was a little weird because each thing was it's own window; it was kind of modular. I think NOD32 is modular also, but I've never tried it. F-Prot seemed like a nice, simple, effective program. Not much feedback, not too many options, but it did the job. I think I recommended it to my sister who doesn't spend too much time with the computer, I don't know if it's still being used. Anyway, it was too simple for me, and if I remember correctly, it had annoying notifications when something was detected that couldn't be customized.
Panda...I tried this out just a little bit. It was too bubbly for me. Looked like an AV program for kindergarten kids. But it's pretty good from what I understand.
Avast...I tried Avast out for a short time. I was looking for a good free program at the time. It was decent. It had good customizability, and it functioned well. Nothing too special as far as I was concerned. You can skin it. Why anyone would want to skin an antivirus program is beyond me, but you can. It's like skinning a defrag program...what's the point?
McAfee...CRAP! I hate McAfee. My mom bought a laptop recently that came with it and it was pure crap. It has a crazy interface that's bubbly and looks simple, but it's pretty non-functional. And you have to register online (with a password and login) to use to program. I think it was for downloading updates and new definitions? Anyway, it was junk. There was no way to turn it off, and there was always some notification for something popping up. And uninstalling was very very difficult. I hate that program and won't ever give it the time of day ever again. I was going off about it to my supervisor a week ago when I found out he used it at home. Apparently, he didn't have to register for anything, so maybe I just had a bad experience. But I remember clearly how much I disliked that program. And this was fairly recently, like a couple of months ago (McAfee Internet Security 2006 or something). Oh man! I just remembered that my computer here at work uses McAfee Viruscan Enterprise. But that one's not so bad. I still hate them.
So those are my mini-reviews. I don't agree with Scot Finnie's assesment of Kaspersky, I've never had those problems with it, but maybe he uses his computer in more complex ways than I do. (Here's a link to our DC discussion of that:)
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=4652.0
By the way, I don't concern myself about the details of the detection engines of the different programs. Honestly, I feel that any of the major AV programs will provide good enough protection for me. For me, it's more of an issue of UI, customizability, resource use, feedback, etc. I never get caught up in the debates of how certain tests are performed and analyzed, etc. I know a lot of people here love NOD32, and I trust their opinion. I've never tried it, but if I ever had problems, it would be first on my list to go to. From what I've experienced and heard, my recommendations for AV programs (for powerusers) are:
Kaspersky, F-Secure, NOD32
sri:
Excuse me if it's already mentioned, Kaspersky is #1 according to thourough series of tests by virus.gr.
http://www.virus.gr/english/fullxml/default.asp?id=82&mnu=82.
tomos:
I notice AOL Active Virus Shield is no. 2 on that list
Anyone know is there a catch to that being free ?? (well, AOL ...)
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