The Best anti-virus

[Fridge-RaideR]

@ a moderator

I think a moderator has to reset the poll because of 4 things:

Kaspersky is growing real fast

Norton antivirus was great until 2002.. but in 2003 it got slower.. and in 2004 is even slower and it tends to detect fewer virusses in several tests done by AV testers...

also f-prot is starting to show potential

and norman is getting populair every day too..

****

for example.. I wouldnt dare to vote kaspersky when the poll started.. but now I would vote it without a doubt

[CoffeeFiend]

Norton antivirus was great until 2002.. but in 2003 it got slower.. and in 2004 is even slower and it tends to detect fewer virusses in several tests done by AV testers...

Doesn't matter, there will always be n00bs to vote NAV 200x for they don't know any better

[Fridge-RaideR]

I have to confess I was so stupid to even use systemworks 2 years ago *bows head in shame*

[edit]

wots wrong with systemworks? oh nothing much accept the f*ckin amount of memmory it takes for all its services.. while it doesnt even give quality

[/edit]

[craig.mason]

i vote for avg 6.0

[Drazick]

AVAST here.

Look at its latest version...

It's great.

Lite and fast...

[Lost Soul]

my money goes to norton

[chankya]

www.free-av.com is the best anitvirus ever made

1 = > it's free for personal use

2 = > regular free updates i avilable

[Mekrel]

GDATA Antivirus kit, uses a double engine, and is very customisable - I love it and has brilliant detection and also fast too

[p388l3s]

Been using Nod32 for a couple of months now, i have to say it's much more useful than norton/symantec ever was, updates pretty much every day, doesn't hog resources and it will kill a page download while it's downloading if there is an exploit in that page, including in archives. It gets my vote and my cash, it's worth the cash in my book, i recommend this to everyone whenever they ask.

[Zxian]

I have yet to see a virus that [Kaspersky] didn't catch.

Well... according to every test out there... Kaspersky hasn't caught 100% of all the viruses... so therefore there has to be at least one that it hasn't caught...

However, I think that there are two ways that you can go about keeping your system secure. First is to have a program that scans everything that's ingoing and outgoing from your computer and stop the problem before it even exists (i.e. real-time scanning). The second way to go about it is to leave your computer open in real-time and occasionally check for problems when you think that something is amiss.

I personally go for the first method. Imagine that you end up catching the Cherynobl virus (it's still out there people!!!). The Cherynobl virus was written back in 1998 by a university student in taiwan. Essentially what it does is erases the first 1024 cylinders of your hard drive (the ones that are required to have your boot sector on) and then flashes your BIOS to nothing. As of that point, the only way to use your computer is to get a new motherboard, because the old one is fried. All realtime scanners will pick up on this virus nowadays, but if you're relying solely on manual or scheduled scans to find viruses... then you're pretty much hooped when you get hit by this (I've seen this happed to one of my friend's computers, one with a $300 mobo... eep).

As for these "tests" that were completed (the one that Zaldhie and Schadenfroh have posted about), I'm how the people who conduct them actually do the tests. Do they infect a bare windows computer with a bunch of viruses and see if the AV program can fix up the damage that was done? or do they install the programs and then try to infect the computers?

I, sadly, used to be a big fan of Norton (I was naive and thought that the biggest was the best... how wrong of me), and I eventually got sick of my rediculous startup times, so when my subscription ran out, I started to use the trial versions of various programs. Avast didn't give me enough control over what was going on. AVG just had a hideous interface... I could barely find the manual scanner... BitDefender was easy to use and configure (I tried the combo package with firewall and all). I was completely blown away by the fact that NOD32 was so fast and efficient. I guess it's the engineer in me that just appreciates the magic of good software. I may not have been so thourough in finding so many viruses, but my friend and I complied a CD with 400 MB of "cracks" from eMule (we used his secondary boot of Mandrake to make sure that none of the files were cleaned). Then we both started our Windows XP computers (both SP1a and with all ciritcal updates) and popped the CD into the drive. My NOD32 quarantined the files right on the CD!!! The log file said that NOD32 quarantined every single file on the CD. On his computer, he had to copy the files to his hard drive before his AV would say anything. Once we were done, we checked at three online scanners (Panda, Norton, and one other one, I forget which) and both of our computers were clean.

I'm gonna stick with NOD32. It's stupidly fast and has caught everything up until this point. Chances are that I'll never leave until the day that I do get a virus on my computer (8 months so far... even with that onslaught of viruses).

P.S. People who say that NOD32 cuts corners... it does!!! but in a really smart way... it doesn't scan inside .wav files for viruses (just as an example, and other file types that can't be used to infect a computer)

[Niklas]

"Essentially what it does is erases the first 1024 cylinders of your hard drive (the ones that are required to have your boot sector on) and then flashes your BIOS to nothing. As of that point, the only way to use your computer is to get a new motherboard, because the old one is fried."

So I guess that flashing the motherboard isn't going to work, the second and cheapest thing to do in that situation would be to order a new BIOS, not to by a new motherboard?

And the CIH-virus only works on Windows 95/98 systems, not very common these days.

[Zxian]

With the CIH virus, you had no access to the mobo at all. When your computer turned on, everything would be powered, just not doing anything.

Win98 is more common than you think. It's my alternative (I haven't tried Linux yet) for systems that just don't have enough system resources for XP (Anything under 600 MHz, 128MB RAM).

[CoffeeFiend]

P.S. People who say that NOD32 cuts corners... it does!!! but in a really smart way... it doesn't scan inside .wav files for viruses (just as an example, and other file types that can't be used to infect a computer)

Others don't scan those either. There's no way anything could scan a PC reliably (other than just the exe & dll files or such) at this speed (that's my opinion anyways). Kaspersky does a very thorough scan by default, but you can tell it not to go crazy scanning inside sfx installers inside a iso image that's rar compressed type of thing And nothing has quite the detection rate Kaspersky has and the very fast updates. Nothing is pefrect, but this one is as close to perfect as it gets imho. Anyways, the idea is to run something decent, ie: not norton stuff

[ozanarisan]

F-Secure ClientSecurity.

[phoenix_nf]

AVE..its free, and i alos use PC-cillin 2002.

but the product subscription (PC-cillin) is nearing an end, gotta look for a nice'n' FREE planet (anti virus).