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Anti-Virus Adventures and Disasters
Quick Report
Read some somewhat negative reports about Avast (my longstanding AV program). I'm not big on being convinced as to the value of ANY a/v but I thought I'd give some of the alternatives a try.
(You might want to know that I did my uninstall/install routines very carefully and by the book)
1. Tried Avira (free) - it gets very solid tech reviews which place it amongst the best.
Result - disaster. Completely unable to update virus definitions. According to their Forum (with staff in attendance) - either because they'd just pushed an update and their servers couldn't cope (!) or because there was some problem with Windows or some issue with my Host file (it wasn't). So which was it Avira? Their server I reckon (I did get one definition update at 12kb/sec). Nowhere near good enough. Their forum is full of these complaints.
Uninstall
2. Norton (Trial). Easily the best looking and nicest to use of the lot and despite the very bad history of Norton products this has supposedly overcome those issues (hog, footprint, slowness, removal etc). and it felt good. One problem: their Heuristic engine DOESN'T WORK in windows7. so I keep getting Widows incompatibility messages about Norton Drivers. Norton online fix is good but fails to recognize that its a Win7 incompatibilty problem. Maybe there's a win7 version but I couldn't find it.
Uninstall (the uninstall tool only partially does the job and has to be run twice! Still had to manually remove some stuff - can't teach an old dog new tricks)
3. Kaspersky. Nice. They've got a Win7 Beta version. It doesn't expire till late December! You can't actually find it on their site (without searching and finding a link in one of their News Releases). But I found it and gave it a go. It's Beta so what follows should be tempered by that fact.
Locked up the system during full scan. Slowed Utorrent badly - had to write rules - still no good. Crashed explorer.exe (during full scan), crashed firefox etc. Oh, sh*t. By now I've lost patience.
Uninstall
4. Install Avast
Sweet. Everything works. system is fast. No 3rd party firewall but Windows Defender is fine - Unobtrusive.
Maybe it won'ft find every Virus, or the complaint that there are too many false positives is true.
Guess what - I can live with that.
I just don't want to have to have an interface with security all the time (never did like the cops).