I need anti-virus help! which should I install?

TheSaint_2

I personally use AVG at work and at home, it has won several awards for reliability catching viruses but you are absolutely right to pick up on the fact that a full scan will slow you down quite a bit.
There are two options here:
1) Schedule the scan for late at night and leave the PC on (not very green!)
2) Do a full scan when you install it and then leave it running in the background with full scan's disabled.

Option 2 is the one I go for. Once you are sure your machine is clean AVG running in the background will pick up on any new threats as they try to enter your computer.

Stick with AVG, its free, its great and it has a very small memory footprint when running in the background.

bazzlad

TheSaint wrote: »

I personally use AVG at work and at home, it has won several awards for reliability catching viruses but you are absolutely right to pick up on the fact that a full scan will slow you down quite a bit.
There are two options here:
1) Schedule the scan for late at night and leave the PC on (not very green!)
2) Do a full scan when you install it and then leave it running in the background with full scan's disabled.

Option 2 is the one I go for. Once you are sure your machine is clean AVG running in the background will pick up on any new threats as they try to enter your computer.

Stick with AVG, its free, its great and it has a very small memory footprint when running in the background.

IIRC, and I think I do, AVG free doesn't have the full range of scanning tools Avast does thus, in theory, leaving you open unless you run scans.

So if you did the same as he suggested, but with Avast, you'd be better protected.

:A

TheSaint_2

You could get a virus onto your computer yes, but as soon as you tried to do anything with the file it would be pulled by AVG.

In my opinion having all the other scanners (such as URL checking) enabled just slows down your web browsing experience needlessly.

Its also a ploy for companies to get more money out of you by convincing you of the need for 6 scanners not just one

:eek:

bazzlad

You could get a virus onto your computer yes, but as soon as you tried to do anything with the file it would be pulled by AVG.

In my opinion having all the other scanners (such as URL checking) enabled just slows down your web browsing experience needlessly.

Its also a ploy for companies to get more money out of you by convincing you of the need for 6 scanners not just one

Ahhhhhh but link scanning also checks for sites known to give out spy/malware - neither of which are protected by virus scanners (due to them not actually being viri) so it does have a use!

esuhl

bazzlad wrote: »

viri

Is that the new plural of virus, then?:rotfl:

bazzlad

esuhl wrote: »

Is that the new plural of virus, then?:rotfl:

It's a geek joke. Don't worry about it

While the word viruses is more often used in medical and professional literature, the form virii remains popular in some Internet communities. There may be several reasons for the use of this word even when it is known to be unusual.
Leet-speak is the name given to variations on languages where frequent intentional misspellings are common, even using numbers and symbols to replace the letters of a word. These languages developed in an environment where plaintext occurrences of certain words were bound to attract unwanted attention; the tradition of intentional, sometimes flashy, misspellings originated as a way of communicating semi-steganographically on bulletin boards.
The creation of plural forms by tongue-in-cheek stretching of English plural 'rules' is popular among hackers, sometimes as a way of marking a term as community jargon. See boxen and mouses for the most visible examples. Other examples, whether widely used or not, are easily recognized and deciphered, and it is well understood that these irregular (or hyper-regular) plurals are not errors but examples of geek humor.
Usage of virii within Internet communities has met with some resistance, most notably by Tom Christiansen, a figure in the Perl community, who researched the issue and wrote what eventually became referred to in various online discussions as the authoritative essay on the subject,[5] favoring viruses instead of virii. The impetus of this discussion was the potential irony that the use of virii could be construed as a claim of superior knowledge of language when in fact more detailed research finds the naive viruses is actually more appropriate.

mikegahan

I would recommend Avira as it is good and does not slow my machine down too much. Once set up it does not need any fiddling with as a 70 year lady will want something simple