Best antivirus?

Soldato
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There are good and bad points about every AV.

The best AV's right now, from what I have read and learnt, are Kaspersky, NOD32 and Avira Antivir.


My favourite right now is probably Kaspersky (I have used all 3 btw). NOD32 is far more expensive than Avira and Kaspersky at the moment, and I can't see it offering a great deal more...
Avira is lacking a web scanner and mail scanner in the free version and they do not offer good English support (they are based in Germany and many of them cannot speak English). It also seems to be getting fairly high false positive results, that is why it has got "Standard" in recent retrospective tests at AV-Comparatives.org.

By the way, you can see the November 2007 results summary on the AV-Comparatives.org website here: http://www.av-comparatives.org/index.html?http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/overview.html
NOD32 and Kaspersky were the only ones to get Advanced+. The offical results should be out in the next few days.
 

emu

emu

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big up for antivir here

boss got his machiner infected with smitfraud and it cleaned it all down nicely :D
 
Soldato
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Do the free ones actually keep your PC safe I mean what benefits do the paying ones have really? I cant stop the damned firewall coming everytime I start windows.

It depends on what you do and which products you compare.

In my case, I pay for an AV (Kaspersky), because I am a fairly high risk user, do quite a bit of downloading, and quite often get infected emails from friends.
I also like the fact that Kaspersky is able to protect itself from being disabled/damaged by malware with it's "self defence" system. This is a huge problem I had with NOD32 and Norton once. I opened an infected file, and before the AV could do anything it had been completely ******!
The slight issue I had with Avira is that the free version does not have a Mail scanner, and like I said above I often get infected mail from friends. It also lacks a web scanner, this isn't a huge problem, but it would be nice to have one.
I think AVG has fairly poor detection rates compared to many of the paid for products, and I found Avast had only slightly better detection, but it used something like 6 processes and did slow down startup times. I also couldn't live with that disgusting interface.

Having said all that, for the average user an antivirus like Avira AntiVir Classic would probably be enough, but in my case £12 for KAV is a bargain and well worth it. :)
 
Soldato
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I'm going to try Kaspersky 30 day free trial and if I like it I might buy it.

Let me know how you get on.

And by the way, the 50% sale at Kaspersky ends on the 27th of the month, so if you do decide to buy it you will need to purchase it before the trial finishes to get the 50% deal.
 
Soldato
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I just installed kaspersky and, well, after like 20 seconds windows locks up but I can still use my cursor, I just quickly got task manager up and killed services I thought was the antivirus then it worked and Kaspersky said to restart to apply new updates, dunno what went wrong but disabling the firewall incase it was that.
 

C64

C64

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Avira AntiVir PE Classic just tried that seems good yea i like the fact you can disable the start up entry and services and just enable them when you need to use it will keep this one i don't usually use anti virus but lately seem to be getting quite a few causing bsods.
 
Soldato
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Liking Kaspersky now, I deleted the installation from Vista, uninstalled it in XP, then re installed it and it seems to be working fine.

On launching Xfire it detected riskware: Invader (loader), is this what Xfire is or is it just a virus thats got into Xfire?
 
Soldato
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Liking Kaspersky now, I deleted the installation from Vista, uninstalled it in XP, then re installed it and it seems to be working fine.

On launching Xfire it detected riskware: Invader (loader), is this what Xfire is or is it just a virus thats got into Xfire?

I think that is the proactive defence. Xfire was probably trying to access somewhere that KAV thought was risky. I have disabled "Application activity analyzer" myself in Proactive defence because I use a firewall with HIPS, which already alerts me to application changes.

If you think it is harmless, you can add it to the trusted programs list in Setting > "Threats and exclusions" > "Trusted Zone". I have added all of my trusted programs into that list, like my firewall, etc.
 
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