Best Anti Virus Software - Free or to buy?

Browntoa

Ewido is free ???

unless you want the full version but there is no point

Spybot is free as are adaware and a load of others

free4440273

divadee wrote:

Can anyone give me advice on the best anti virus software around now?

Be it free or to buy let me know your suggestions

I have been using norton 2002 (old but i thought good with all the updates on it!!)

thanks in advance

i use avast and avg (both completely free). as someone else mentioned, nod32 (not free) has decidedly got the edge on most anti-virus programs. its network edition in particular is outstanding

garcia

Browntoa, someone was comparing Kapersky vs AVG to a Ferrari vs bicylcle eariler, which isn't really a fair comparison given bicycles aren't generally free.

divadee

now i am confused you lot!!!!!


Last night my pc completely carshed thanks to norton :mad: have had to completely reformat and start over (yes i know i should back up but i dont)

right at the moment i have on pc

avg
kerio
spyware blaster
spybot
ad aware
ccleaner
tune up
diskeeper 10



now i can think about seriously which av and firewall to use got those just as a stop gap for the time being!!!! Might keep them, when i have figured out how to use them properly.:o

My next question as well is (maybe should of started a new thread for this)

If i buy an external hard drive can i just copy everything over to it? So if my pc every completely crashes again, i could just copy everything from the external hardrive onto my internal hardrive?

Also how much would an external hardrive cost? I think i would need about 40gb at the very very very most. At the moment on my pc (i still have stuff to put on though) i am using up 12.3gb

Browntoa

get 250gb ones for about £70 these days

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/901058

you can only copy documents files etc....but you could "ghost" everything as an exact copy

divadee

Browntoa wrote:

get 250gb ones for about £70 these days

:eek: can you not get smaller ones!!!!!!


also is it possible what i waht to do? not that bad with a pc but not as good as you lot

would it be easy just to transfer it all over?

Browntoa

using ghost means that at a given date you did the back up you cound copy the "ghost" back to the original hard disk, that is operationg system,files ..everything

80gb ext drives are not alot cheaper

divadee

Browntoa wrote:

using ghost means that at a given date you did the back up you cound copy the "ghost" back to the original hard disk, that is operationg system,files ..everything

80gb ext drives are not alot cheaper

thats norton ghost yeah?

i have heard of it but never used it, i think i have got it here somewhere on my norton suite cd.

i have never done this so would be a new experience!!

Is there any other wya of making life easier if your pc crashes and you have to start from scratch?

wolfman

Kaspersky or Nod32 are generally seen as the best. I use Nod32 is it's very light, has good heuristics and scans very quickly. I have used Kaspersky but found that a bit heavy for my liking.

AVG is good considering it's free, although I definitely prefer one of the above paid-for solutions. I've always read AVG doesn't have the best of detection rates, although you never really know.

So I'd either go with Nod32 (around £30) or AVG. And Kerio Personal Firewall (Free).

wolfman

divadee wrote:

Is there any other wya of making life easier if your pc crashes and you have to start from scratch?

Unattended installs. (http://www.nliteos.com/)
nLite is quite an easy app to use for stripping out and adding to your Windows CD. If you're feeling a little more advanced RVM Integrator is very good (http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/).

But the easiest solution is to get setup perfectly, then as mentioned above, take an image of your Windows partition. I'd suggest only keeping Windows and any applications on your C drive. No files, or anything personal. That way if it does crash, you can reload Windows without having to worry about recovering all of your personal files (as they'll be stored on another drive/partition).