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On Demand AV Protection For Vista


Jody Thornton

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I know in the "Last Versions of Software for Vista" thread, there's a whole list of still-working applications, but I wonder what most of you are all using for AV protection.

I just jettisoned MSE 4.304.4 because of performance issues, so I'm looking for a good replacement.

:)

 

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For myself I use Clamwin (Super lightweight, quite a few false positives, no real-time scanning, however there is ClamSentinel add-on for that) and a couple of portable AV scanners from time to time (for example Trend Micro HouseCall or Kaspersky scanner)

 

For any family/friend/client I use Avast (realtime can be shut off if one wants), whether it's XP/Vista or something newer.

Edited by i430VX
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I've been running a free version of BitDefender, sort of by fluke.  They aren't looking for Vista users as customers it seems, but early in 2017, while it was still sinking in that MS wasn't going to keep updating MS SE for Vista, I downloaded half a dozen freebie AV programs to look at, and BD seemed to be the leader of the pack.  Simple to set up and operate, with a good record for catching viruses, and nobody screaming much about false positives.  So that's good, and it updates itself which is nice.

What's bad is that the version of BD I'm using doesn't seem available any more.  So yeah there are still updates, and I'd guess the format of updates doesn't change that much that quickly, but ... I can't really predict this antivirus is going to be working in January 2020.  And BD has one annoying quirk -- it's suspicious of software tool sets like KarenWare and NirSoft, which are perfectly legitimate and useful but haven't become famous, so it's forever scouting them out on my hard disks and throwing them in Quarantine, for possible automatic deletion, even if I've never installed them yet,  So I have backups or can find replacements at Major Geeks, but still ... this strikes me as maybe "over zealous."

As a partner to BitDefender, I run  both free Malwarebytes Anti Malware and MS Windows Defender to look for spyware and the like.  This doesn't give continuous coverage, but you get them both running on different schedules without too much effort.    So that's good and the cost is rigjht,
 

Edited by mike_shupp
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I was using Malwarebytes 1.75 and SuperAntiSpyware (just to remove cookies).  But I was just running manual scans.

MSE never really caught anything, so I wonder how bad off I'd be just running Vista with no on-demand scanner.  It runs better without MSE.

:)

 

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Hmmm.  You've got just a month or two of running Vista left, right?  Before leaving us old-timers for the greater ... uh, prospects ... of Win 8.1.   And for all the hullabaloo at Intel and AMD and Microsoft, the horrors of Spectre and Meltdown and such have so far been more theoretical than actual.   Odds are you could run unscatched for that short period without any special efforts -- set the clock back to December 2017, so to speak, and maybe run the occasional manual scan. 

This wouldn't be a wonderful strategy if you intend to come back to Vista, just to look around say, in another five or six years using your present pc ....  but I suppose in five or six years we'll all be reduced to running Vista in virtual machines or sandboxes or containers or whatever-the-hell-the-nerdish-buzzword-is-then.

On my system, right now, the best protection seems to be frequent backups.   I keep operating systems on smallish partitions (150 GB) on different disks, back them maybe once a month or when I'm about to install something major or change the hardware.  And at the first sign of alien intrusion or machine hiccoughs, I shut down Win 7 or whatever, go to another OS,  do a full format on the misbehaving partition and reinstall the previous month's version of Win 7, or maybe several months previous.   This seems to work;  I'll admit I didn't really conceive of it as "an antivirus strategy."  It was more of a "How do I get rid of those damned advertising popups and silly bloatware that came along when I installed that stupid trial version of a database" strategy -- and it works for that too.

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Backing up your system is the best strategy, yes. I use AVG Free as antivirus (AVG was bought by Avast so it's almost the same) and I use Macrium Reflect Free to backup my system (except for the Data partition). I make one full backup every month and a differential every week. These backups have saved me from great trouble (e.g. reinstalling from the recovery partition) several times.

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On 8/19/2018 at 4:05 PM, Jody Thornton said:

I just jettisoned MSE 4.304.4 [sic] because of performance issues, so I'm looking for a good replacement.

When I mentioned reports by Mathwiz of elevated CPU usage using MSE 4.4 on an XP virtual machine beginning here, I didn't mean to suggest that you should uninstall MSE ASAP. You had mentioned that "performance felt a tad slower" and I thought it might be MSE rather than a bad Server 2008 update. (I hated to see your FrankenVista thread thrown into disarray by one report of a program not working properly, but here we are.) Any real-time protection is going to consume some system resources. A better reason not to use MSE 4.4 might be that the installer was signed Oct. 24, 2013 - although it might be quite effective with today's definition and engine updates.

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26 minutes ago, Vistapocalypse said:

I didn't mean to suggest that you should uninstall MSE ASAP.

Yeah but I wanted to see if there was anything to it - and there was ....lol.  Besides, if I had tried it, and my results didn't agree with yours, I would have just reinstalled MSE.  No harm done.  :)

 

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