I have AVG 7.5 installed on 3 computers, the paid version on all. No problems, and I update daily and run scan. I definitely downloaded updates every day in November. In fact, I've never had any problem at all with the software. I believe I've been running it for 5 years or thereabouts. OldTrader
Running without antivirus is like having unprotected sex. You feel clever until you get the bad news on an unexpected day
For older computers (or ones where you wouldn't want an AV process constantly scanning everything you do, for memory/CPU reasons), ClamAV is wonderful. It's a completely free, non-mainstream AV that stays very updated and is in my experience extremely stable. It does not have real time scanning functionality, but you can schedule daily scanning. Your only real exposure is a) opening untrusted files, b) zero day exploits in a program you use. I don't do the former, and run fairly non-standard programs that are very rarely targeted successfully.
Here are some superb tips: There's a freeware program called Winpatrol, and it's very useful for detecting changes made by malicious programs. It also lets you control your start-up list it is not a true antivirus or antispyware though. Also there's a free antivirus and firewall called comodo. It is very mainstream and works well, you can use it for whitelisting or blacklisting traffic.
Antivirus packages are close to become obsolete. Thinking they will protect you from really dangerous exploits (e.g. new MPack versions) is pure nonsense. AV vendors are months (years?) behind the best malware coders. My proposal: Get rid of AV bullshit and transfer your internet related activities into an isolated environment (sandbox, better: virtual machine)
uh what 's sandboxand virtualmachine ? How good is XP's built- in firewall vs ZA ? I have used ZA but a very old version, always afraid of using a more recent one as I know ZA has been the source of many problems on UPDATES . the techie friend who helped me troubleshoot my laptop runs a CD ( i think it's Ubuntu) to access her system and do all her internet banking, according to her, it's impossible to hack your account when you do that. what do you think ?
Run a *NIX machine, no such thing as any realistic virus threat in that world... Or run Windows machine solely for trading - No P2P, no browsing, no IM, no external media ever read by computer except 100% trusted (such as legal copy of software) behind a decent firewall, all recent patches installed and no AV really needed then too. As for "usual" machine: backup, backup and again, backup... Most important content of computer these days is data, not some piece of crap code aka OS. So, backup your data regularly and don't care much about "bug which can destroy OS". Reinstalling OS and software from scratch is like a day of work in worst case, loss of important data can be equal to loss of years of work. Still, I think it's wrong statement that chance of catching a virus is lower than chance of destructive A/V software bug. Experienced many viruses in my life on many computers, but never had any crashed by A/V software itself.
I just heard that running as non-Admin in Windows can lower your chances of getting an infection, something I've never heard before. I'm going to look into sandboxing my Dad's surfing activities. I assume you can use Firefox from within a sandbox. I spent an hour ridding his rig of Registry Defender over the holidays (thank you, MalwareBytes). He tends to click on stuff he shouldn't click on. I set up a non-Admin account for him so hopefully that gives him incrementally better chances. He got XPAntivirus2008 last year and that one was a bitch for me (MBAM and ComboFix eventually zapped it). I'm finding those two programs very useful after infection.
I heard thats true, but with XP, as a puta luddite, i dont know how to import setting as such-and of course, you cant bloody do anything without admin control, its a pain. Been running comodo firewall, Spybot search and destroy, Malwarebytes-no probs so far. Of the serious stuff that crashed the old one, that didnt compare in day to day running with windows problems and software conflicts.
Not so much it can lower chances of GETTING an infection. But it indeed can lower chance of infection SPREADING on a whole system. Though XP is pretty weak in this sense, Vista is already better (but still far behind *NIX-like systems such as MacOS and Linux).