My Mcafee subscription just ran out and I don't want to renew since this program has caused a lot of problems with my online gaming. Anyone have good advise on which antivirus programs are the best?

Vito Wrote:
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> My Mcafee subscription just ran out and I don't
> want to renew since this program has caused a lot
> of problems with my online gaming. Anyone have
> good advise on which antivirus programs are the
> best?


Norton is much better than McAfee. I had McAfee for a while and it was basically like not having any protection against viruses at all. If you do a Norton scan, I bet you will pull up a lot of stuff McAfee missed.

Linux. ;)
on Linux you can use Cedega to play modern windows games, including WoW which actually runs faster on Linux than the most optimized windows machines.




if you absolutely must use windows the best antivirus program is one that prevents them entering your computer. the most common way of a virus getting on your computer is through your web browser. therefore,

using my 1337 google skillz, i found a very informative post on virus/malware/rootkit execution detection/eradication:

Quote
ask.slashdot.org

I have tried both AVG and Avast, after choosing not to continue my TrendMicro PC Cillin subscription. I have also installed/tested both on computers belonging to friends and family. Here are a few of my experiences.

AVG good stuff:

• Good interface with all the bells and whistles a modern app needs
• Easier for end users to use than Avast (according to my mom and girlfriend)
• Finds more spyware and tracking cookies (I experienced Avast miss a real life spyware once, for about 22 hours until it was updated)
• Easy to install, even for end users

AVG bad stuff

• Users (including myself) experienced multiple browser crashes and computer stability issues. Problem first arrived with installation of AVG and disappeared when AVG was uninstalled. Coincidence? Not likely:-/ Acceptable? Not in a million years!
• The URL malware detection browser plugin is crap. It reads ahead every single URL on a homepage, and displays a little GIF icon with a checkmark when the URL is good and clean. Nice in theory BUT it makes your bandwidth usage explode, and makes browsing a drag - to say nothing of what the result must be for the owners of homepages you visit. Magically "all pages are now visited" by all users?
• Virus engine can not be stopped easily if desired. I sometimes play games, and being behind a NAT gateway I don't want my antivirus running alongside Day of Defeat, Natural Selection and Team Fortress 2. AVG is hard to disable, and clicking on the tray icon will only let you disable the management interface (and thereby the tray icon) while the scanning engine continues to run.
• Too many tricks and attempts to lure the user into buying the paid-for version. Almost resembles "legal phising" on occasion, which is kinda sad. Key information screens are supplied with "warnings" that you are using the free product.

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Avast good stuff:

• Uses less resources
• Gets the job done without tons of bloatware and fancy extra browser plugins (easier to install without tons of fancy plugins and extra features which have nothing to do with basic virus protection)
• Can be disabled easily if desired, with right-click on tray icon. Good for gamers in their mid 30's who know what they are doing!
• No crashes and instability like AVG

Avast bad stuff:

• Interface less intuitive, says mother + girlfriend.
• Installation requires slightly more finesse as the installer is a little more confusing.
• Perhaps (?) slightly slower on updates. My mom had a malware file sent to her by mail, and it remained undetected by Avast 22 hours longer than an identical file on my girlfriends PC which had AVG.

---
At the end of the day, I went with Avast. Stability and low performance impact is more important to me than a fancy GUI. Clueless end-users disagree though, and actually want AVG back inspite of the stability issues. So the GUI really made a difference for them. They simply felt more "at home" with AVG.

Direct links for both products:
AVG Antivirus Free Version Download [avg.com] and Wikipedia Description [wikipedia.org].
Avast Antivirus Free version download [avast.com] and Wikipedia description [wikipedia.org].

brgds

- Jesper


(Experience is from: 3x Vista computers with reasonable hardware specs, and 2 older Windows XP computers)

i hope this helps. however, if this does not help you, i hope you get hit by by freddy.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."
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Also, stop running dumb apps from the net, stop falling for quick big dick/get laid scams from emails, stop visiting russian/chinese/suspicious porn sites.

WashingTone Locian Wrote:
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> Norton is much better than McAfee. I had McAfee
> for a while and it was basically like not having
> any protection against viruses at all. If you do a
> Norton scan, I bet you will pull up a lot of stuff
> McAfee missed.


both Norton and McAfee suck at detecting viruses/malware/rootkits. they also eat up resources like a motherfucker.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

ESET NOD32

http://www.eset.com/products/nod32.php

Another option is ClamWin. It doesn't do real-time checking though, just scheduled checking. It is open source.

I rely on popup ads to tell me whether my computer has viruses or not.

ESET hands down.

I just picked up ESET today and it works really well.

I had a browser hijacker and several viruses from the gay porn sites I visit on a daily basis. The BDSM men on men sites are the worst, I got about a dozen trojans from visiting those.

Thank's for the advice. I did some research and decided to go with Avast. The newest version is highly rated and looks to be competitive with other highly rated software. I especially like that this software is completely free. I had to tweek it a little bit for gaming, but it was pretty easy to do so and it hasn't slowed me down since then. Seems to work well so far, it found a few "rootkits" when I did my first scan. Thought about using ESET until that last gay porno post.

Vito Wrote:
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> it found a few "rootkits" when I did my first scan.

sounds like the guys over at Mcafee are doing a bang up job.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

There doesn't seem to be any one antivirus software that stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. There are about half-a-dozen that are consistently top-ranked.

Among that group is Kaspersky, my current antivirus (for the past 18 months). It works quite well, and its performance is rated good to very good in independent test rankings, with those ratings varying a bit from year to year.

I previously used Trend Micro PC-cillin. I thought that worked pretty well, but I'd rate Kaspersky a couple of notches better.

Although I didn't purchase Kaspersky for this reason, the thought did cross my mind that the nastiest, hardest-to-delete viruses seem to come out of Russia and/or Eastern Europe. It seemed to me that Russia-based Kaspersky might be particularly good at handling those threats -- it takes a thief to catch a thief kind of thing.

I think if you install almost any decent, up-to-date antivirus, and stay away from sketchy porn sites, particularly thumb pages, you will avoid 99% of viruses. If you install a great antivirus, and spend a few hours crusing porn thumbs -- you'll probably get a virus.
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I just bought McAfee (VirusScan Plus 2009) a few weeks ago (I was using Clamwin) and I'm not happy with it. I keep on getting "Virtual Memory To Low" warnings after I installed it which is pissing me off.

Also, I'm not sure what the deal is with the Firewall. I had the old (2003) McAfee Firewall that worked fine but I had to uninstall it to install this freaking memory hog. I'm supposed to have Firewall on my new program, but I don't get reports any more telling me about any attempts to access my computer like I used to get on my old Firewall.

I've got FIOS coming in less than 15 days and I'm worried about security. Verizon said that my wireless will be "password" protected, but I'm worried. Any sugestions?

I've used Norton and McAfee over the years, and now I'm using a copy of Trend Micro that was given to me. I'm pretty satisfied with it so far, and from the looks of things, is a lot less user and resource intrusive as Norton. However, I don't tend to truly judge an anti-virus program until I my PC actually gets raped by a virus/trojan.

If you're looking for a program that deals specifically with Adware, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware is a program I used for a few years and was very happy with. Run a scan, and you're bound to find things in your cookies/temp files that are suspect. Since this crap is nearly impossible to avoid if you're even a casual internet surfer, it's not a bad idea to run a scan for adware/spyware every now and then if your anti-virus provides it.

I've been using Ad-aware and CCleaner for awhile now. They always pick up stuff that my Anti-virus software never picked up. I'm also using Firfox as well.

One odd thing I've noticed is that ever since I've installed McAfee, my Ad-Aware scans take forever (eight hours to do a full system scan).

We use Microsoft Defender and it works pretty good.