Free antivirus software article

murphydavid

evosy1978 wrote: »

Hi. Thanks.

No I don't have common sense. But yes I do have win 10.

I have Asira AV and malwarebytes and windows defender turned on.

Is there anything I should do. I've just bought a desktop.

Thanks

Ok I'm not sure if you are just asking about protection but in addition to security you should also 100% consider recovery. I am always quite careful but also quite adventurous and have been saved many times by backing up my working files, making a complete copy of my system when I know it is running well, checking I have restore points being automatically created every day and running new software in a virtual environment before fully installing it. Its a big and quite opinionated subject but you can do all of this with an external hard (gigabyte drives are quite cheap these days) drive that you leave disconnected when not backing up so it can't get a virus while its disconnected and use free software you can find if you surf the net and look for it. Typically I back up my whole system disc while not logged in to my normal operating system using Macrium Reflect Free. There are lots of others.

murphydavid

On installing Avast free I noticed that it turns off windows defender which includes windows firewall and only provides anti-virus protection. In Windows 10 it is advisable to turn windows firewall back on and maybe windows smart screen as well. Also if you decide to uninstall any security software it is well worth checking windows defender comes back on. I recently uninstalled McAfee and the only way I could get Defender back on was to manually remove a line from my registry that was stopping it.

molerat

I have Avast and the WD firewall and SmartScreen have not been switched off. WD just shows Avast as the AV.

murphydavid

molerat wrote: »

I have Avast and the WD firewall and SmartScreen have not been switched off. WD just shows Avast as the AV.

Thats the position Ive also ended up at. I had McAfee via BT protect as part of my ISP package then BT said that if I didn't take out an 18 month contract with them they would increase my fees. That spurred my into looking at what I was getting for my money and decided EE was a better ISP for me. That in turn meant I lost my McAfee license. I uninstalled McAfee only to find windows defender was left turned off. After much web searching for instructions I managed to get it turned on again. I was unaware that there were 3 aspects to the built in windows protection and thought that a green tick for windows defender was all I needed. I left it like that for a while and I don't know if at that point windows firewall was on or not. Anyway I then decided to install Avast and it said it was disabling windows Defender at which point I noticed the other two were turned off as well.

murphydavid

I have just installed Avast (the free version) and done my first scan and it has come up with a number of issues under "performance". I can get a list of what it thinks is wrong and having looked at a few of them and I think they are relatively minor, nags rather than dangers, confirmed because I can see that the performance of my PC is good compared with what my windows xp used to be like. There is a very friendly button that says "resolve". But it should say "I ain't going to resolve anything unless you pay up" because thats where it ends up. Maybe I shouldn't be so frugal and the web page does indicate that the free version is limited but I personally would not categorize it as free. Its like those people who come up on web searches with the best price only to add a massive P&P charge after you have spent time filling in your details.

buglawton

murphydavid wrote: »

On installing Avast free I noticed that it turns off windows defender which includes windows firewall and only provides anti-virus protection. In Windows 10 it is advisable to turn windows firewall back on and maybe windows smart screen as well. Also if you decide to uninstall any security software it is well worth checking windows defender comes back on. I recently uninstalled McAfee and the only way I could get Defender back on was to manually remove a line from my registry that was stopping it.

It's commonly recommended not to run 2 AV products concurrently as they interfere. My last experience with McAffee was removing it from Windows 10 on a new computer as it made BBC iPlayer unusably stuttery, and enabling the free inbuilt Windows Defender which caused no such performance issue.

Netherspark

Avast has been annoying me recently, it almost looks like it's becomming adware itself. I really dislike how it uses minor non-issues to try to pressure me to upgrade

Rollypolybirch

May I please ask you techie savvy people this question I’ve just got an iPad - do I need a virus checker putting on it please?

grumpycrab

I'd say a virus checker on an ipad is unnecessary; the main issue I've seen on ipads? People clicking adverts. This is what Apple says
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203987

While I'm here a good time to suggest Windows Avast, AVG free alternatives...
Bitdefender https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/free.html and
Kaspersky https://www.kaspersky.co.uk/free-antivirus

The_Miser

Mista_C wrote: »

In case it helps anyone...

I get a lot of laptops come in for work running the latest AVG (with most recent updates) and missing a lot of infections/intrusions. The last two laptops with AVG I dealt with totalled 176 of them.
.

Windows 10 latest update) You surprise me but perhaps it is a question of where you download from. I go to a wide variethy of sources (but no blacknet ones) and in perhaps 20 years I have had a sole (one) nasty get through AVG freeware. That was a threat of a takeover which would not delete (as usual I suspect).
I simply turned power off (not the closedown button) and when I turned on again I went immediately to "delete programs", saw the one which was loaded that day, deleted it and AOK.


I do use a paid AVAST program to clean out rubbish - well worth it unless there is a free equivalent. BTW Avast free a/v will not work if AVG a/v is working - and they are now the same company!



Going back to MSE advice "delete programs you do not use" - seems common sense but when confronted with a mass of program names how do find out what they are, which are required for another program, etc. ?