The Gnat on 4/5/2010 at 20:05
Muzman, for clarification, are you saying the laptop already has Windows Defender, MacAfee, Norton and Spyware doctor installed as well as AVG and Malwarebytes?
Muzman on 4/5/2010 at 20:34
Now it does, yes (or did. Have just restored). Norton and MacAfee are just 'security scan', which I assume is some OEM cheap install version. None of the above were working properly, it seemed to me. I wasn't sure they were behaving properly so I installed the others as well so I'd know what to expect.
Muzman on 6/5/2010 at 13:43
Small update.
I reverted it to a restore point about a week old just to be on the safe side and it seemed almost like a different machine. Everything seemed to work fine that I could see. Vista was still saying it had no virus checker (only Defender checking for spyware, which still didn't catch whatever Malwarebytes caught), so I put AVG on again to make it happy.
Even after restoring that far back Malwarebytes still found the same apparent thing (I don't know how restore points work. Maybe that's expected).
So anyway, I gave it a few scans and connected to to the net to update a few things and see if any problems crop up. It seemed pretty good, but it wasn't an exhaustive check or anything. Not knowing exactly what it was like before, I gave it back to them to see if they could find anything else weird. Couldn't really do much more. Hopefully it holds.
Thanks for all the advice.
bikerdude on 6/5/2010 at 14:49
Quote Posted by Muzman
Even after restoring that far back Malwarebytes still found the same apparent thing (I don't know how restore points work. Maybe that's expected).
Tell your friend to go and buy a copy of a decent virus checker, Norton or Kaspersky will both do the job.
Scots Taffer on 10/5/2010 at 06:36
If I'm reading this thread right, AVG is shit for antivirus and if I want a decent free one I should change? So which is considered the best, Avast and Avira?
Renzatic on 10/5/2010 at 08:16
I like Avast myself. I've been using it about 3 or so years now, and have yet to get a virus (which, now that I've said that, I'll probably get about 10 tomorrow).
Though personally, if you're all so hardcore and paranoid about virus/malware prevention, I'd recommend getting Virtualbox, grabbing an old copy of XP or a Linux distro, give it a gig of ram to play with, and do all your internet related activities through that. It isn't too difficult to set up, and on the off chance you get a virus, all you have to do is delete the drive image. Your host OS will remain completely untouched, and you won't have to spend nearly as much time on security upkeep.
The only downside is it'll requires a goodly bit of hardware to keep things flowing smoothly if you want to play with some high end applications on the host OS alongside the VM. It isn't something I'd recommend to anyone without having at least 3-4 gig of ram installed on their machine.
Enchantermon on 11/5/2010 at 02:24
Avast and Malwarebytes should cover you. Nothing has gotten through since I started using them.
The VM thing is safe, yes, but really overkill. As long as you have a decent antivirus program that scans while you surf, you'll be fine. A firewall doesn't hurt either, but I've gotten along just fine with Windows' built-in one. Avast picks off anything malicious that tries to get in.
