need recommendations for virus checker

[Guest]

Greetings ... my email/internet computer has suffered a hard disk crash ... just wondering what virus checker software you guys are using/avoiding before I set up a replacement ... also ... any tips on which laptops and desktops are good/bad/ugly would be appreciated ... I'm pretty much out of the "geek" loop these days - so I'm still trying to decide which way to go ... and I'm not really worried about serial ports ... I've given up on that - the Keyspan USB adapter is working fine for what I do ... reality check: I'm probably just going to buy a new hard drive and format with XP Pro ... I hate the idea of trying to un-install Vista (and all the junk that I hear comes with new computers) ... thanks ... Ron

[paulengr 44]

If you want a FREE virus checker, AVG is one of the best out there and it's what I use. Every 3 days it pops up a nagware screen that you just click on the "OK" button to close. If you are willing to pay (and pay and pay) for virus software, supposedly (not verified by me), Kaspersky is the way to go. That particular program does NOT kill you hard drive while it does a scan. ALL others that I'm aware of are pigs when it comes to scanning, no matter what their documents say. In addition, I highly recommend that you switch from Internet Explorer (all versions except theoretically 8.0 which is not available yet) to Firefox. Microsoft has come right out and admitted that IE 7 and earlier are simply not secure and never will be. By the way, FF 2.0 is very slow. 3.0 is getting better. I'm running an alpha of 3.1 and it is faster than any web browser out there as far as I can tell. That being said, you may want to wait about a week or two for 3.1 beta 3 to be released. The javascript compiler appears to have every single bug fixed as far as I can tell.

[Mickey 71]

I recommend "Avast" for a free anti-virus ( see link below) http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html

[newpageboba 7]

I recently bought a Dell D630 for our non profit ski club. It has a serial port. But the key thing was, I purchased it with a free downgrade to XP Pro. (and 2 Gig of RAM) Also, I use AVG free. I don't get any pop ups. It is an excellent AV scanner. Edited 10 Feb 2009 by newpageboba

[BobLfoot 301]

Ron I was drug kicking and creaming into the Vista realm when my firstborn announced he wanted a mchine which would play Halo 2 and which he could use for College. I picked up a real nice HP Pavillion at Office Depot for under 1K and that with a gig of ram and a trerrabyte of HD space. The real downer of Vista was I also had to upgrade my router to be compatible. To answer your question - I tried and am still using Microsofts One Care package on my Vista and Two XP boxes. It seems to do ok at catching stuff and it also gets you free chat with Microsoft tech support on just about any issue. That has paid for itself in debugging all the neuances of Vista.

[Guest]

thanks to all ... I've just formatted a "reasonably new" hard drive that I had in an unused computer ... installed XP Pro - and downloaded SP3 - and now I'm back online again ... total elapsed time: about 5 hours ... luckily I was able to work on other things while the downloads were grinding away ... I'll work on the Virus Checker tomorrow ... thanks again folks ...

[TimWilborne 108]

I use NOD32

[Wulfgar 5]

I'm also using AVG, great free anti-virus program with low overhead. I've never had nagging popups from it in the several years I've used it. I would also recommend Firefox if you are still using IE, I'm using 3.0.6 at work and 2.18 at home. For some reason 3 refuses to run on my home computer for more than a couple of minutes before locking up. My home computer is an Intel Quad-core 9300 running WinXP.

[Clay B. 1]

I use AVG and have no complaints. One thing I do is run a complete system scan each night starting at 1 am. The reason I do this is I found alot of tracker bots on my laptop. These would try and run at the same time slowing my downloads and other ativities down. AVG will see these and tag them as Warning's so you can delete them. I am not sure if other virus software does this but I have found it to be a real handy feature with AVG.

[panic mode 246]

Same question was asked on another forum. AVG, Avast and Kaspersky seem to be most popular choice becasue they don't make your pc run like it's 15 year old. AVG has free edition which I'm using on hime machines. Avast is free as well. Kaspersky is comercial product, they do have occasional promos (3-12mo free). Didn't check NOD32 yet.

[Guest]

thanks for all the tips ... I'm trying out the free AVG package now ... it seems to be doing everything that I need - with no noticeable slowdown ... I'll let you know if anything comes up ... thanks again - to everyone ...