"The Free Antivirus Thread"

altrenda said:
For those that use MSE, do you see an increase in calls for infections recently? Are your clients getting hit more often now?

It's hard to go by raw numbers because I mostly see machines with MSE, AVG, or out of date Norton or McAfee. I rarely see Kaspersky or anything else on clients machines, regardless of the reason for the call.
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Had a laptop come into the shop today that I had installed MSE on a few months ago. It was re-infected. Had a ransomware program locking the whole works up. I don't blame MSE for this though. I blame the end user and there is nothing I can do about that side of it. I cannot install enough AV, spyware protection and firewalls to protect someone from themselves.
 
16k_zx81 said:
Just wanted to throw THIS article into the mix as its very recent and is a fairly comprehensive list of the available options currently, if anyone is interested to read.

Many there I had not heard of...
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Thanks for the link...and yeah, they had some starting on page 2 that I never even heard of. A couple there that I have heard of and somehow missed when making the above list. I will edit the list later this week...long day today, gotta hit the sack cuz getting up early to travel to Manhattan to go work at a clients office.
 
altrenda said:
For those that use MSE, do you see an increase in calls for infections recently? Are your clients getting hit more often now?

It's hard to go by raw numbers because I mostly see machines with MSE, AVG, or out of date Norton or McAfee. I rarely see Kaspersky or anything else on clients machines, regardless of the reason for the call.
Click to expand...

It is still equal for us...the malware it getting past every brand....although I see a higher percentage of infected home users with McAfee or Symantec or ...most commonly...AVG. But even for our business clients...the malware is slipping past Eset and Kaspersky...two typically top rated products.
 
Thought i would bring this up since I could not find anything about it on here. While messing around with my ESXi and VM's I was looking at free AV's for the Server OS's. Clamwin will install but I'm not sure how actively it is maintained. While MSE is not the definitive solution in a production environment you can install the 64 bit version on 2008 R2 STD. I tried to install it on SBS 2008 but there is a block.
 
gunslinger said:
Had a laptop come into the shop today that I had installed MSE on a few months ago. It was re-infected. Had a ransomware program locking the whole works up. I don't blame MSE for this though. I blame the end user and there is nothing I can do about that side of it. I cannot install enough AV, spyware protection and firewalls to protect someone from themselves.
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Probably bad parenting. Ha ha.

Seriously though, I've never really seen MSE be very effective at all. Avast, on the other hand, especially coupled with Malwarebytes Pro, really seems to do the job for just about all my clients...at least right now.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
There was something 2 maybe 3 years ago where it deleted a critical Windows system file during bootup....this was a lethal false positive. Made for a really fun couple of days replacing those files on unbootable systems.
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Actually I think that was AVG, wasn't it? Or am I misremembering? AVG made my s-list for something like that.
 
TechLady said:
Clamwin is so bad I don't know if it should even be on the list. Seriously.

Anyway, those of you in education may be interested in this: http://www.avast.com/en-us/education
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Yeah Clam is useless for malware threats to Windows....especially since its free scanner for Windows doesn't have any realtime protection. Best use is really for SMTP scanning (it's a good scanner for e-mail servers).


But anyways, thanks for that link for Avast (Reps sent!)....editing my first post in this thread with that info. That's a sweet deal! (although I may lose a school client that I sell a 100x node Eset package to each year. )
 
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The first time I ever heard of ClamWin was on one of the AV comparative sites and it was ranked somewhere around 30-40% ... behind non-AVs like AdAware. If I ever see someone here recommending it for an actual PC* ...that person's credibility is shot.

(*other than a specific use like StoneCat just referenced)
 
TechLady said:
Probably bad parenting. Ha ha.

Seriously though, I've never really seen MSE be very effective at all. Avast, on the other hand, especially coupled with Malwarebytes Pro, really seems to do the job for just about all my clients...at least right now.
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Most certainly bad parenting! lol

I'm testing out the latest version of Avast now. Not sure I like the new UI, I'm also hearing about a lot of false positives.
 
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gunslinger said:
Most certainly bad parenting! lol

I'm test out the latest version of Avast now. Not sure I like the new UI, I'm also hearing about a lot of false positives.
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At this time it is probably the best free AV out, I uncheck pretty much everything but the file network behavior and script shields. I dont use the 3rd party software updater unless its on a computer that isn't going to have some other 3rd party update utility.

When you consider how small of a performance footprint it has, the whole boot scan system, the temporary sandbox thing that annoys the crap out of techies but helps protect some users and the lack of annoying popups its likely the best free av........................for now.
 
I have been using avast for quite some time have yet to see any false positive also it has least amount of malware when installed and it's updated every few months the new software updater is great lets you know when your software is out of date and asks if you want to update flash, java ect.
Out of all the free av's i find it stops more the web shield seems to stop all malware from installing and scans faster than even paid av, i use it personally i have yet to get any spyware i did test with malware domains on virtual machine then did scans and found nothing.
 
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DocGreen said:
...There is one problem that I've run across with Avast, and this would apply to both free and paid versions. I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this, so if so please chime in!
I have a business client, a Buy-Here Pay-Here car lot... they run a simple workgroup network of store-bought computers and a Linksys router. [I'd upgrade them, but they don't want to spend the money]. They run a couple different industry-specific applications to manage their business along with Quickbooks for the accounting. Their applications all use some form of database, and all of the databases (including QB company file) are located on computer A, with computers B & C configured to access the files stored on computer A. Everything ran just fine for them until I installed Avast on all their computers (they were previously unprotected.) After that, everything worked, but their apps were incredibly slow to load the databases. It took me a while to pinpoint the cause, but it turned out that Avast's "Behavior Shield" was the culprit. Once I disabled the behavior shield, everything worked perfectly. Ever since then, when I install Avast for business clients who use databases I always customize the install and choose to NOT install the behavior shield. ...
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Wow, I think you may have just solved a major problem for me here! A client of mine recently switched to an online database and had to upgrade her whole business setup. She replaced all her old laptops (2000/Windows XP) with brand new Windows 8 laptops and asked me to setup the interface to be as user friendly for them as possible. I also installed antivirus Avast on all of the laptops. At first everything went fine and she was overjoyed with her new wireless connection that is until all of the computers connected to their online database. That's when the trouble started and the connections started to drop. Max 3 pcs at a time sometimes not even. She needs everyone to connect at the same time and that's 10-15 at a time. Such a situation was impossible and switching to a better router didn't help. I tried everything but the problem still exists. It never occurred to me that Avast could be the problem.

I personally use Avast and find it highly reliable and the best antivirus software out there today. So far all of my clients that have come in for Virus repair have had Norton or some other antivirus on their PC. After the fix and with my clients permission, I replace them with Avast. I will certainly try your fix and see if that is indeed the problem with my client's PCs. Thanks for the tip!
 
Well, I been using Avast on a test machine for the past week and have to say its not that bad. It still eats up some system resources and I'd never install it on my own system but once the options are configured properly its not that bad. I may be making the switch from MSE.
 
gunslinger said:
Well, I been using Avast on a test machine for the past week and have to say its not that bad. It still eats up some system resources and I'd never install it on my own system but once the options are configured properly its not that bad. I may be making the switch from MSE.
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havent noticed anything, its really light, but all i enable is the file, behavior, script and network shield, everything else not installed
 
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