AVG is old as are spybot and adaware. What’re the best (free) ones to use now?
Good question, I’ve been thinking the same thing. Although AVG seems to work fine for me right now, I switched to AdAware because the Spybot searches were taking like, an hour and a half. The searching method is inefficient :\
Spybot SD with Resident Turned On and ClamWin scanner.
To add a bit extra security in FF. Use No Script.
And of course a nice firewall, either physical or software.
Otherwise if you like a good shield, Avast is nice.
I use AVG, McAfee and Xoftspy here, but pay a subscription for all of them- worth the money though.
First person in this thread to say ‘Norton’ in a non-ironic sense loses.
Don’t spybot and adaware find things, but then, kind of, not fix them? I’ve never had success with either of those cheap programs. Never used AVG. Whenever I’ve had to remove any seriously annoying spyware or adware, the process had something to do with manually cleaning the registry or using specific fixes in safe mode or something.
And I’ve had to do it a few times, since I don’t use anti-virus software. AV software is more of a virus than most viruses imo. If I could find something to just run in the background without draining resources, maybe. But I’ve never seen any AV software that’s any less intrusive than the problem it tries to fix.
I use McAfee and Spybot (w/Resident on. Picks up on near any change.). They work pretty well I guess. Never had any real problems with viruses much (yay for Firefox and auto-clearing everything). Though I had one computer muddled with 'em (my sister and her nonsense). It eventually met its fate someplace else…
That’s more or less what AVG is. It won’t keep you safe from everything on the face of the internet, but you can just have it running on the background so as not to work completely bare-assed, which should by all means cut the crap intake at least some. It’s a cheap condom and it breaks often, but you don’t even notice it’s there, so it kind of evens out.
Spybot and adware are good to clean up the basic, trash spyware. For the more vicious ones, you’ll pretty much always have to look up the specific problem and ways to counter it once you’ve identified the intruder or at least the symptoms.
I use Trend Micro’s OfficeScan (real-time scans for all malware). I also administer it on about 3000 PCs for work. I guess that’s a misnomer though - it pretty much runs itself. OfficeScan also has a personal firewall that we centrally manage.
I haven’t been hit with anything personally for years. For other PCs, I just use Hijack This and manually remove the malware. However a friend was just hit with some nasty stuff, and Hijack wasn’t enough - she ran an executable from a torrent that installed a bunch of shit. I used SpyBot S&D to clean, and that got rid of most of it. To remove the last malware program I used Malwarebytes, based on a recommendation I found. It ran so slow I had to let it go overnight, but in the morning I rebooted and the PC was clean.
Use Firefox with Ad Block Plus and that will protect you against most of the browser-based malware (it targets IE through ads). Keep your OS patched with automatic updates, and keep your third party apps patched as well (Adobe Flash/Acrobat, media players, etc.). Finally, don’t infect yourself by running software you can’t trust (serial key cracks, pirated software, EXE files, etc.), and you shouldn’t need some bulky scanner running in the background.
I’ll look into Avast tomorrow since someone else recommended it. Anyone else use that?
Best advice in this thread yet. You wouldn’t fuck a crack whore, so why would you let your computer fuck one?
Hear, hear!
I second avast!
Avast and Spybot SD is sufficient