"I don't use anti-virus and i've not had any problems ......."

[Totality]

What a load of FUD. Anti-virus, even Microsoft's MSE, cause huge slow downs for any PC. Read: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/choosing-anti-anti-virus-software.html

Anti-virus is not akin to car air bags at all. UAC is that. Anti-virus is more akin to those traffic wombles that come along in their 4x4's and set out road cones AFTER a road accident has happened.

Lol. Just lol!

AV does not cause huge slow downs on all PCs ffs. I run Avast on an encrypted hard drive on an ultraportable laptop and can see absolutely no difference in performance with it turned on or off. Performance is fine and battery life is hardly affected. I'm not sure what you're doing but if my little low-voltage ultra portable laptop can cope with it I'm sure desktops will be fine. In fact my mate runs Avast on his netbook atom based laptop and it never has a problem!

Plenty of people still get viruses who have AV installed as they are not 100% accurate, but I'd rather be safe than sorry and catch the percentage of threats it will detect. At work we receive virus alerts from clients that have visited real legitimate sites that have been hacked and have bad code embedded. People in this thread who say they are safe because they only visit known sites are kidding themselves really.

 

[mrk]

Did NathanE just quote a website article dated from 2007?

*rubs eyes*

As has been said above, and earlier in the thread, modern PC's do not suffer these magical slowdowns some people complain of when a decent AV package is installed.

Decent as in:
- AVAST
- NOD32
- Kaspersky
- AVG
- FSecure
- AntiVIR

I think a get with the times statement is in order!

Sure no AV is 100% sure. This is why other2nd opinions exist, on demand scanners, online scannners and this is also why people run regular full scans and on-demand scan files they download (those with common sense will sandbox them just to be double sure when executing them).

 

[tntcoder]

Did NathanE just quote a website article dated from 2007?

*rubs eyes*

He also posted a 2010 report.

You can argue about this subject forever No one is correct either way really.

For a concerned enough home power user though:
a) there is a relevant performance impact.
b) It's easy enough to survive without using AV & malware protection by using safe practice combined with educated common sense.

Not to mention the host of other issues with the AV industry you could write essays on.

 

[mrk]

I consider myself a power user (and a gamer), but I do not consider my system to be slowed down by any measurable amount because I'm using a resident anti-virus product and neither do the countless other people out there who follow the same usage path as me.

The majority of those tests for all the decent AV suites on Windows 7 are either fast or very fast. The figures for Workbench are fine but they don't say to what that 115 scale max score translates to in the real world. is it 2 seconds from the faster "with AV" score? is it 18 seconds?

This is why I never rely on these kinds of mass reviews and tests, they're never real world accurate and it's the same reason I and many others do not rely on gaming benchmarks from 3DMarks and the like.

Then there's system spec, everything from RAM timings to CPU cache affect how software runs and data is transferred and at what pace.

The story is very different on an average spec PC though I will agree to that!

 

[tntcoder]

Essays? Do go on.

I consider myself a power user (and a gamer), but I do not consider my system to be slowed down by any measurable amount because I'm using a resident anti-virus product and neither do the countless other people out there who follow the same usage path as me.

I agree and that's a perfectly cool view, on a modern multi core system you probably aren't going to notice (or get annoyed by) a well designed AV. But at the same time it's also fine and correct for the geekly minded to say that they don't want X millions of CPU cycles wasted and X% of RAM wasted etc on something that might benefit them 0.1% of the time.

Just saying that I think both views are equally correct and that people who call it 'madness' not running one these days are miss informed.

This is what I meant about the bad sides of the AV market:

- It's a fear based industry, you don't invest in security out of 'want' because you don't see a return on investment. You buy out of 'fear' even if it's subconscious. Sure some of it is free but the model still applies. The anti virus threat is severely overrated now days IMO with a modern well patched and configured OS the threat is easily controllable and damage mitigated with things like UAC and good backups e.t.c.

- Given this business model, it is easy for these companies to exaggerate the threat, possibly even developing viruses themselves so they get the signatures out fastest (Paranoid, yet plausible).

- It messes with your OS kernel in very low level ways and in a closed source way. You're placing serious trust here in these companies, and when it goes wrong (and it does, and again, and again introducing kernel vulnerabilities) you're screwed.

- Any targeted virus attack by someone who knows what they are doing can trivially bypass AV.

It's always gonna have a place in business setting though and with most but by no means all home users. Im sure the AV effectiveness debate will go on for many decades to come

 

[Rroff]

If your resident AV isn't causing moderate to severe slowdowns its probably not that effective tbh for proper protection it does need to embed itself pretty deep into the kernel, ring0 filtering drivers, the works... which will result in slower file acces, web browsing, boot up, etc. its unavoidable, in the case of the likes of Norton, etc. tho its just bloat.

 

[NathanE]

I consider myself a power user (and a gamer), but I do not consider my system to be slowed down by any measurable amount because I'm using a resident anti-virus product and neither do the countless other people out there who follow the same usage path as me.

I don't consider you a power user.

modern PC's do not suffer these magical slowdowns some people complain of when a decent AV package is installed.

Yes they do? See the posted evidence. This is starting to remind me of:

Decent as in:
- AVAST
- NOD32
- Kaspersky
- AVG
- FSecure
- AntiVIR

I think a get with the times statement is in order!

I can remember incidents over history where several of those have hosed systems all over the world due to broken updates that were automatically sent out. Kaspersky had it happen again just recently, in fact. And some of those aren't even rated or don't rate very well on this: http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_od_aug2010.pdf

Anti-virus is old technology. It was needed, perhaps, in the 90s and early 2000s. But now, with secure desktop operating systems, it has long since been made surplus to requirements.

Anti-virus software, paradoxically, meet all the definitions of a computer virus:

- They slow your PC down.

- They hook into deep parts of the kernel, which Microsoft neither documents nor supports and which can be broken and cause cyclic-boot BSODs if a sufficiently impacting Windows Update is installed. This is otherwise known as "root kit technology".

- They pop up annoying prompts seemingly randomly on the desktop. Often the prompts are about nothing more than a harmless .txt file in your Internet Cookies folder. But hey, got to be seen doing something right? Otherwise people might not renew their yearly subscription

- They ask you to pay money to their operators.

- They use non-standard user interface design.

- They cause crashes.

- They cause compatibility issues with other software.

- They often do not uninstall cleanly when asked to do so, leaving remnants behind - often their kernel hooks.

- They constantly phone home.

Does this list scare you? Because it should.

 

[mrk]

I can see what you mean and I don't know about other AV that I have not used before but AVAST and MSE certainly don't cause crashes and neither have had issues of not uninstalling properly either!

My only issue with MSE is a well documented one where large volume directories slow down as the MSE engine trolls through them at a snail's pace, AVAST doesn't have this issue.

Either way though, I decided to spend last night running my PC and doing various stuff with AV disabled. I noticed no difference in general usage but I did note that on a cold boot that huge apps like Photoshop CS5 x64 and Lightroom 3 x64 loaded a bit faster.

Those are the biggest apps I have apart from games but they load the same anyway and everything else ran the same as before too.

I admit I was wrong in saying there is no difference because there is some even if it's not tell tale in general usage. I will continue my research on my own PC for the rest of the week and keep AVAST installed and only on demand scan files I download as and when needed. As an alternative I will re-enable UAC one notch above 0 and set my account as a standard account while keeping a separate Administrator account (I assume this is the way some folk advised here previously?).

I think that will be the only fair way to properly compare having no AV vs having AV in daily usage scenarios!

 

[NathanE]

Microsoft's MSE is the only anti-virus I would consider installing. The others just do too much dodgy stuff inside the Windows kernel. At least with MSE you know that because it's a Microsoft product they won't be using undocumented hacks that could literally break, catastrophically, on any given Patch Tuesday.

In fact, I do install and/or recommend MSE for certain friends and family whom I consider "vulnerable" computer users.

 

[sturmtruppe]

Using Comodo V5 since september and cant say ive witnessed any of the above - its actually less of a resource hog than xfire - currently using 7.5 mb of my ram.

The firewall rules are also a lot easier to create in comparison to the p*ss poor way windows firewall does it.

^Basically its easier to use security and less resource usage than on a fresh install of windows.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Ignorance is no excuse....

"I don't use anti-virus and i've not had any problems ......."

 

[sastusbulbas]

I do not get this thread?

Every "mates" machine I have helped with which has had no or out of date Anti-Virus or no or out of date malaware type product has had something installed even when there was no reason for the owner to expect such? Do programs such as Avira and Malawarebytes make these lists of infections up?

My own machine ran what I thought to be reasonable security, I was running Avira and MSE, with Ad-aware too, I had also installed Avast, Malawarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware for occasional scans. Still got a pain in the ass infection recently which I still don't know the actual cause of or harm caused, could not tell if Comodo, Avira or MSE pop ups were fake and the virus or if it was what the fake MSE pop up claimed as Java exploits?

Recent MSE updates or Hitman Pro seem to have solved it, Ccleaner was no use, no idea what to trust.

And in my experience it's not all dodgy sites which install malware and such infections, I have five user accounts on this PC (real world PC users inc a 4yr old and 6yr old, not the rare "expert" types found here) and have found Anti Virus and spyware programs usefull.

My other two PC's are HTPC types, one hardly ever on the web, the other only recently rebuilt with a new Windows 7 install and a couple of visits to this and another forum. Malaware found on the one that is sometimes online? and a Trojan on the new build after downloading a few security programs and a couple of forum visits? (computers and bicycle related) Says a lot about PC security protected or not

 

[snowdog]

This is why I use avast, free, and you don't notice it in silent/gaming mode, even blah blah has successfully updated messages annoy me a lot of various AV programs.

Apparently the network and the web shields both have blocked some infections in the past, but the file shield hasn't .


NOD32 was great for ages, but the definition update messages were annoying. And after a couple of years it went kaput, with log files worth many gigabytes and sometimes slowing the pc down a lot. It blocked some hacktools I was playing with ( Cain and Abel) which was annoying.
Kaspersky was rubbish from the first moment I tried it, entering folders on my hdd was 3-4x as slow ( perhaps it didn't like fat32 back then, perhaps some other issue, nod32 didn't have the same issue anyhow).
AVG- Loads of false positives, slows down pc a lot, and didn't pick up some serious threats.
Norton- I liked until 2002, after that, hogging rubbish.
Avast - I like it now in gaming/silent mode, mo more BS info I don't need, blocks threats and stays in the background, cba with AV that pops up on every blocked thread or update or whatever. Doesn't hog too much res from my experience.

 

[Cold_And_Miserable]

It's easier to reformat than try to get rid of nasty malware that's corrupted Windows beyond SFC /scannow repair.
AV software is useless at detecting most malware, let alone removing it.
64-bit IE and UAC is the best defense.

 

[stoofa]

NOD32 was great for ages, but the definition update messages were annoying. And after a couple of years it went kaput, with log files worth many gigabytes and sometimes slowing the pc down a lot. It blocked some hacktools I was playing with ( Cain and Abel) which was annoying.

Go into NOD Configuration.
Turn off Update Notifications - no longer get update messages.
Been running current installation of NOD32 since Win7 release day - log files are tiny.
And as I said before - I notice no real-time slow down from running it.

Maybe you were using NOD32 a couple of versions ago?

 

[NathanE]

Ignorance is no excuse....

"I don't use anti-virus and i've not had any problems ......."

When phrased like that, I would agree that it comes across as ignorance and you have to wonder if they're the sort of person that disables UAC as well. But not everyone, especially the few in this thread that are against AV, have such simplistic views.

 

[snowdog]

Go into NOD Configuration.
Turn off Update Notifications - no longer get update messages.
Been running current installation of NOD32 since Win7 release day - log files are tiny.
And as I said before - I notice no real-time slow down from running it.

Maybe you were using NOD32 a couple of versions ago?

I ran it for 3-5 years on my xp install... Yeah it was an old version ''Eset.NOD32.2.51.30''. It's been a couple of years.

But at the end I think I had log files 1-10gb in size .


But I can't really be bothered to change AV now, avast in silent mode does fine . For any new builds I might consider it...

When phrased like that, I would agree that it comes across as ignorance and you have to wonder if they're the sort of person that disables UAC as well. But

I ran without AV for a couple of months too years ago and after NOD32 went on it found nothing. And yeah I'm the sort of person who disables UAC, it's the first thing to make windows bearable in Vista and 7. I left it on for my mothers laptop though but for myself, I'll NEVER run an app that asks me to confirm every single thing I install, run for the first time, etcetc. I simply run my pc using the hidden account so there's no bs with running things as admin and UAC disabled, I have avast for AV, Windows Defender for spyware, disabled the bloody annoying security center, and running a hardware/router FW and windows FW, enough imo, if it messes up then too bad, rather reinstall than 30 extra clicks or annoying popups every single day.

 

[stoneman]

for those who are happy to put there trust in using just an av good luck to you,
for those who would like to try new and yes better things may be interested in this forum. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35
for those of you who want to learn i hope this helps as much as it has me over the last couple of years!

 

[Ratbag]

for those who are happy to put there trust in using just an av good luck to you,
for those who would like to try new and yes better things may be interested in this forum. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35
for those of you who want to learn i hope this helps as much as it has me over the last couple of years!

The Wilders forums are full of paranoid losers who have nothing better to do than debate the merits of running multiple security apps simultaneously rather than doing anything constructive, meaningful or fun with their computers.

How does that sound?

 

[Boozebeard]

When phrased like that, I would agree that it comes across as ignorance and you have to wonder if they're the sort of person that disables UAC as well. But not everyone, especially the few in this thread that are against AV, have such simplistic views.

The first thing I do when I install windows is disable UAC, it drives me nuts ;o