One of the tech guys came over to my PC to check my AV software yesterday. (at work).

He found that it didn't have any installed and probably hasn't for the whole life of the PC.

He installed it and left me to get on with my work.

I updated the virus definitions and ran a quick scan... 0 risks found. What exactly was it supposed to be protecting me from for the 4 or 5 years that it hasn't been installed?

Came to turn my PC on this morning and it took almost 4 times the length of time to turn on as normal. Popped up with a memory read error with some hex reference. The AV shield in the sys tray popped up and then disappeared within seconds. Several services that run on start up of my PC were stopped from running etc...

Now my PC is running like a complete dog.

I decided to run a full scan to see if there was anything affecting my PC.

So far it's found 1 Trojan Horse virus! But it's actually a license program for a development tool that I use...

This is why I don't like Anti Virus Software.

It serves no purpose other than to cripple the user's PC.

It does serve a purpose. A couple of my company's hotels have had viruses and the AV has blocked it and a couple of scans gets rid of it.
I assume they installed Norton or McAfee and have not configured it properly.

In a corporate environment you should also be sat behind some pretty hefty firewalls which will stop most internet based attacks. AV on personal machines is normally more for things like memory sticks which can carry them (or because it's a non-technical manager who doesn't realise that a firewall will do the job).

Want to tell me that again? I have a complete site infected with Conficker! Before I started, the machines were never patched and nobody let the AV software run a scan, because it takes nearly 2 days to complete and the users can't do anything while it is running (1.2Ghz single core processors and 256MB RAM).

The problem is, Conficker is hard to get rid of! It gets re-infected as soon as the machine comes back on-line! The recommended way is to take the machines offline, until they are all clean... But closing down a complete manufacturing plant isn't an option!

On my machines I now use MS Security Essentials, it doesn't slow the machine down much and it is relatively light weight.

I had GData on the machine I use at work, tried making a slipstream DVD of Windows 7, I gave up after 12 hours, deinstalled and installed MSSE and it completed the generation of the files in about 15 minutes!

Nicola had a friend round for the evening who brought her camera. Nic wanted the pictures transferred to her laptop so she plugged the memoy card in. Conficker was picked up instantly and cleaned by the AV software. I dare say had she not got AV then her laptop would have been infected.

Me too.

I hate Sophos, McAfee and Norton with a passion. When I go to site I often find myself saying "Installing this software will take two minutes, or up to 16 hours if you won't turn off the god damned security software". Seriously, try unziping a 1gig file with on-access scanning enabled.

My old Toshiba took over an hour to boot with McAfee installed, and would fail completely to load a lot of applications. The antivirus was by far the most resource hungry application, using more memory and clock cycles than every other application I ever ran all added together. Needless to say, I had to switch it off in order to do my job.

A friend of mine recently had his Windows installation totally trashed my a combination of Norton and Kaspersky while trying to upgrade from one to the other. If he didn't have knowledgeable friends, it would cost him a fortune to get it all fixed on top of the money he'd paid to break it.

Between false positives, sluggish performance, instability and total system failures, Antivirus is very often a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Good hygiene can dramatically reduce the risk of infection. It's just a shame that Microsoft were forced by stupid evil lawyers to make Windows insecure.

AVG Free FTW in my opinion, if i ever get a laptop to repair, i remove any Norton/McAfee type software and install AVG, this increases performance of the equipment 10 fold, and that = happy customers!

Welcome ali_g.

I use AVG on anything I fix for friends, although the web page scanner has been giving grief so I disable that. It also installs the ask toolbar when I request that it doesn't, but as it's free is only a mild annoyance.

Thank you very much, i'm just having a scout about, seeing what 404 is all about.

i find the email scanner effective, but abit of a pain, as it adds a *.txt file to every email as an attachment initially, i'm sure there's a way around it, but that's another niggle of mine.

As I recently "upgraded" from XP to 7, my old version of Zonealarm wasn't compatible, so I upgraded the latest and I have to say it's even better than before. The scan speed is brilliant (probably less than half the time it used to take), and it appears to do both virus and malware at the same time. It also appears to have a very light footprint. For £25 I consider it well worth the money.

I know little about AV software other than I have no need for it.

I was given to understand that Win 7 has it built in now. Is this not the case?

No CC, it isn't.

You can download Microsoft Security Essentials, if you want, but Microsoft don't pre-install it - heck, look at the flack they got for including a music player and a web browser!

Most manufacturers tend to bundle a trial version of one AV package or another with their machines - the Toshibas we buy all come with a McAfee trial pre-installed, but we just remove it during the initial set-up.

Your Mac can still spread viruses to any removable media that gets plugged in to it. Unless you don't ever connect the machine to the 'net and never let any removable media near to it.

Mark

Me too... too...

I don't see how that is possible. How can I spread what I haven't contracted?

As to Win 7 it seems ridiculous to me that MS don't secure their own system. Totally ridiculous.