Anti Virus software

[Handruin]

What is everyone using for anti-virus software these days? I was using inoculate IT, from Computer Associates, but they are going to charge for using it. I guess I could stay with them, but I am not aware of what else is out on the market that is good.

Are there any other anti-virus utilities that are free these days (legit)? Or should I just suck it up and go buy one?

[timwhit]

Check out: http://housecall.antivirus.com

Mercutio reccomended it awhile back.

Damn, I'm too drunk to be posting. It took 15 minutes to write that and make it look right.

[Pradeep]

Norton AV 2002. Grab an OEM copy, should be good for 180 days of updated.

Now a few years ago I would have rather been castrated than had a Norton product on my machine, but NAV 2002 is surprisingly good.

[Tea]

I understand that castration is relatively painless these days, what with modern anesthesia and so on. On the other hand, so is PC-cillan. It seems to work for me.

[flagreen]

I use PC-cillan as well with no problems. They even incude a fire wall with the latest version. It's not free however.

[Groltz]

NAV 2002....Overly mainstream, but effective.

[Mercutio]

Well, I'd pick castration over anything actually running on my machines.
But that's why I tolerate housecall, since at least I don't have to keep it
running all the time.

I scan all my machines by mounting all their drives (and those of file shares with Windows files) through the machine running housecall. For me, it takes about an hour to download the updated engine every time, so I don't do it that much, but it's a big step up from Norton/McAfee/Trend whatever sucking whatever performance my PCs have to scan every single I/O.

Virus scanners are basically useless. I've never had a virus.

[Mercutio]

F-prot for DOS is free and works pretty well, but it doesn't help you for NTFS partitions. I carry a copy around when I need a good tool.

Also, every virus scanner worth any amount of money will run a scan and tell you if you have a virus during the install process, which is helpful. You don't have to finish the install (so no piracy), and then you can just hit housecall.

Not using Outlook, IE and OE probably prevents about 90% of household viruses. Probably 60% from Outlook-kin alone.

[Tannin]

Although I'm running PC-cillan on my home box at present, I only stuck it on the other day. Mostly I don't use anything: same deal as Mercutio, don't open attachments, don't use Outlook or anything remotely related to it. That makes you 85% safe.

Don't install Microsoft Office on any machine that matters: that gives you 90% safety.

Don't install Windows, use a real OS such as OS/2 or 'nix: then you are 99% safe.

Do use your CDR. That makes you 100% safe.

[P5-133XL]

NAV 2002: It works for me

[Handruin]

Check out: http://housecall.antivirus.com

Mercutio reccomended it awhile back.

Damn, I'm too drunk to be posting. It took 15 minutes to write that and make it look right.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I had tried house call last night but it crashed IE 6.0 during installation. I'm trying it again right now and it appears to be installing. I guess it needs a second chance.

I was a little worried at installing anything by norton. About the only product by them that I don't mind is Ghost. If they've gotten better through the years, maybe I will try installing a copy of it.

As I write this it looks like house call is working fine. Maybe I'll stick to using this for now or until they start to charge. :)

[Tannin]

Norton didn't write Ghost, they bought the company. But don't worry, give Symantec a few years to work on it and they'll stuff that one up too.

(Mind you, NAV is decently usable now, something that it wasn't a few years ago. Perhaps the merger with IBM Anti-Virus has helped them.)

By the way, I had a machine come in for some job or other on Friday. It was a Pentium MMX with a 2.1GB Bigfoot hard drive running Windows 98SE on 16MB of RAM and still in daily use for word processing, light-duty gaming, and web browsing. (!) And I could see that it was perfectly safe from virus infection: they had installed IBM Anti-Virus in their autoexec.bat.

1995 edition.

Yup: no updates, no nuffin.

Good God, the Pentium MMX wasn't even released until January 1997, where TF did they find an anti-virus program that old?

Mind you, you could get a nasty infection and have it start deleting your entire hard drive on that system, and you'd still have time to walk down the street, buy the latest anti-virus software, have coffee, and come back before it had finished erasing the first folder.

Thank God he's buying some RAM!

[Handruin]

Norton didn't write Ghost, they bought the company. But don't worry, give Symantec a few years to work on it and they'll stuff that one up too.

(Mind you, NAV is decently usable now, something that it wasn't a few years ago. Perhaps the merger with IBM Anti-Virus has helped them.)

By the way, I had a machine come in for some job or other on Friday. It was a Pentium MMX with a 2.1GB Bigfoot hard drive running Windows 98SE on 16MB of RAM and still in daily use for word processing, light-duty gaming, and web browsing. (!) And I could see that it was perfectly safe from virus infection: they had installed IBM Anti-Virus in their autoexec.bat.

1995 edition.

Yup: no updates, no nuffin.

Good God, the Pentium MMX wasn't even released until January 1997, where TF did they find an anti-virus program that old?

Mind you, you could get a nasty infection and have it start deleting your entire hard drive on that system, and you'd still have time to walk down the street, buy the latest anti-virus software, have coffee, and come back before it had finished erasing the first folder.

Thank God he's buying some RAM!

I guess since Norton didn't write ghost, that's why it works so good for me. ;) I've not had a great experience with Norton products in the past, so I've avoided putting any of them on my system.

The house call is really what I've been looking for. Just like Inoculate IT, it doesn't remain in memory eating up resources. I wanted an anti-virus that I could run from time to time, just to be a little safer from infections. I've gone for years without installing an anti-virus package that runs all the time. Now I'll just fire up house call to check attachments and other odd files I download.

[James]

I use Norton AV Corporate Edition v7.6. That way they don't stuff you about over the definition updates and you can use one machine at home as the server for virus updates - works well, and without all the overkill of NAV 2002.

[Will Rickards]

I've been installing Eset's Nod32 on machines I 'support'.
http://www.nod32.com

At home I use mcafee virusscan 5.21.1000 just because I already paid for it, and it is stable for me. Though it is incompatible with IE 6. So only the on-access scanner works. The download scan and internet one don't.

I have to say housecall saved a co-worker of mine's data.
He was hit by a particularly nasty virus that disabled anti-virus software. Norton would install but wouldn't work. Nod32 failed as well.
Housecall was the only one that worked.

[time]

Which virus, Will? AV vendors usually supply standalone utilities to fix particularly troublesome beasties like that.

As you know, I'm fond of NOD32 as well. I'm no longer as keen on using the AV software bundled with motherboards because it only puts off the time when the customer needs to commit to a product.

Make no mistake, most users are not like the people on this forum. They need something that's easy to understand and for some it needs to be completely automatic. Three year old AV software is quite useless, in fact it's worse than useless because it gives people a false sense of security. But that's what tends to happen because people get the protection with the PC and then think no more about it.

[Mercutio]

Yes. I put whatever comes with the motherboard on the machines I build, but I don't enable it. Instead I have a nice HTML document that shows them step-by-step how to enable it or remove it.

Lately I've taken to adding a Housecall quick button on IE and Mozilla (I install both), too.

[GMac]

Hmm interesting - I'm in the same position as Handruin (as a user of InnoculateIT), and I haven't made up my mind as to what I'm going to replace it with. Sophos is one possibility (we use that at work), whilst Grisoft (www.grisoft.com) do a decent free one (AVG Anti-virus) that I've had good results from in the past. I've also got a few others to consider now, thanks to you guys :D .

GM

[Mercutio]

RE: Screwing up ghost.

Well, it's been done. I noticed today that there are now three different versions of ghost. Ghost Personal edition, which, among other flaws, won't write an image to a network drive. There's also the latest OEM release, which is Ghost Personal Edition spread across two binaries (one for writing, one for reading), and ghost enterprise, which is now the only one that appears to support imaging to network and multicasting.

If you ask me, not being able to run ghost to a network drive with PE is a deliberate crippling of the product. My old copy of Ghost 5 (Ghost 2002 is v7.5) does that just fine.

[James]

My old copy of Ghost 5 (Ghost 2002 is v7.5) does that just fine.
If you're happy with Ghost 5 whatever you do, don't go to www.xxxxxxxx.net and download Ghost 7.5 Enterprise (or any of the other software there, like NAV Corporate 7.6).


[Mod: Removed link to warez site. Don't want to set a bad precedent.]

[Mercutio]

Now we know what you do with that DSL line.

James, I should probably mod you for the above. Illegal link in a public forum. We're really looking for an excuse to moderate something anyway. :)

Anyway, I'm really happy with Ghost v5. the one I paid for. I use it all the time and so far, I haven't seen the need to upgrade. My copy handles multicasting and ghosting over a network, and it works just fine for Linux, *BSD and XP, too.

So what did symantec add in the two newer versions besides those limitations I talk about, above?

[Tannin]

Ahh .... curiosity.

But that flashing ad got the better of me after approximately 0.3 seconds. Zap! No more xxxx.net.

(Edited by Tannin to remove quasi-link to warez site and save heartache for the mods.. Borderline decisions are always the hard ones.)

[James]

I love test cases. ;)

[Mercutio]

Well, as long as you aren't upset about it. I've been uptight since I made the change. :|

[James]

It was deliberately a bit provocative - I'd never, ever have posted such a link at SR. Given the very small audience here and the context I wasn't too fussed if it stayed up or not.

[CougTek]

I didn't realize that Tannin's link was targeted at a warez site. If you wouldn't have edit it, I would have never known. Thanks to my memory, I now have NU2002. Thanks a lot :mrgrn:

[Handruin]

I didn't realize that Tannin's link was targeted at a warez site. If you wouldn't have edit it, I would have never known. Thanks to my memory, I now have NU2002. Thanks a lot :mrgrn:

OMG see what you've started. We are now destined to being a warez board.... :eek4:

:mrgrn:

[James]

I didn't realize that Tannin's link was targeted at a warez site. If you wouldn't have edit it, I would have never known. Thanks to my memory, I now have NU2002. Thanks a lot :mrgrn:
Excuse me, blame where blame is due! That was my link, thankyouverymuch. :)

[Handruin]

What was that link again...doh, I didn't ask, I didn't ask.

[Mercutio]

You're the one who can look in last night's backups, right Doug?

[James]

I get this strange feeling that I've blown whatever chance I might have had of becoming one of the roving moderators. :mrgrn:

[Handruin]

You're the one who can look in last night's backups, right Doug?

I don't have to; it's in the mod forum. :) I was only kidding around asking for it again. I figured you might get bored as a mod if no one broke any rules so I enticed James to post it again. (OK I was being bad)

How am I supposed to look in last night's backups? I'm supposed to make backups of the forum?















:wink:

[CougTek]

What was that link again...doh, I didn't ask, I didn't ask.
It's somewhere on the site, hidden where very few people go and where there's about no traffic at all. Can you find it?

[Buck]

I'm happy for many reasons:
James' link was removed, Mercutio performed his job flawlessly - but with appropriate trepidation; everyone else enjoyed a laugh, and Coug got the software he wanted!

Bartender, Lagavulin for James, and whatever everyone else wants, please server them, it is on me!

BR

[Mercutio]

I spent around an hour and a half fixing a botched NAV Corporate 7.6 install last night. Anyone who wants to tell me NAV is a worthwhile product needs to spend a few quality seconds with the Symantec knowledgebase. Most of the time, after the description of a problem, the text reads: "Symantec support is aware of the problem and is working on a solution." NAV 7.6 has been out since September.

NAV Corporate doesn't have an uninstall routine. To get rid of it, you have to manually delete about a dozen branches in the registry and several directories.

This is a "good" AV product?

[Splash]

I spent around an hour and a half fixing a botched NAV Corporate 7.6 install last night. Anyone who wants to tell me NAV is a worthwhile product needs to spend a few quality seconds with the Symantec knowledgebase. Most of the time, after the description of a problem, the text reads: "Symantec support is aware of the problem and is working on a solution." NAV 7.6 has been out since September.

NAV Corporate doesn't have an uninstall routine. To get rid of it, you have to manually delete about a dozen branches in the registry and several directories.

This is a "good" AV product?

NAV 2002 is a bit WORSE than NAV 2000. Unfortunately for WinXP users, you can't run anything but NAV 2002 (aka NAV Version 7.6) if you want to run a Norton product.

[ My all-time favourite Norton story is that there was once a particular version of NAV for Macintosh that once installed would start reporting ITSELF as a virus! ]

[Handruin]

[ My all-time favourite Norton story is that there was once a particular version of NAV for Macintosh that once installed would start reporting ITSELF as a virus! ]

That's a riot! I would have loved to be there to see that...then again...no I wouldn't.

[time]

The truth slipped out, albeit briefly.

[GIANT]

That's a riot! I would have loved to be there to see that...then again...no I wouldn't.

This was during one of Symantec / Norton's 2 (or was it 3) dark periods when the somewhat-recently-purchased Norton Utilities Group was seemingly on the brink of swiftly losing all customer confidence.

This incredible "WARNING: I AM A VIRUS!" problem with NAV for Macintosh (I'm thinking version 5.0.0) was quickly fixed with a patch, but not before a few *thousand* early adopters experienced this absurd problem.

As I recall, the problem would not surface immediately, but out of the blue as it was doing a scan. About all I can say is: "Hey Peter, do you have any software testing procedures???" I guess they do now!

[LiamC]

Better late than never I suppose but...

I initially used NAV from a motherboard bundle - it went OK until I had to re-install it due to trashing the OS. The "trial" NAV thought I was trying to pull a swifty and wouldn't install. So I installed another copy from another motherboard bundle. This went OK until the trial expired, the upgrade/full year subscription cost seemed poor value.

Installed PC-Cillin from another motherboard bundle and used it. The update mechanism seesm to work better than NAV, and it's yearly subscription costs are far better than NAV. Trying to re- install after a fresh OS install is *much* more strightforward than NAV. PC-Cillin has been my AV of choice since - works better and cheaper...

[Tea]

That describes my experience almost exactly. LiamC.

[GMac]

Well I decided on AVG 6.0 for my box, and so far so good; nice clean install, and it found & killed the only virus I've encountered for a while. Can't complain at all :D .

GM