Antivirus



  • Question for you guys...

    Given the choice between:

    1) Sophos

    2) McAfee

    or 3) the free AV of your choice,

    what would you use?

     

    Also, whatever happened to the IRC channels?



  • I would use nothing.


  • sekret PM club

    Sophos has turned into a steaming pile of garbage over the last few years, same with McAfee. What kind of machine is this going to be on?



  • @Fred Foobar said:

    Also, whatever happened to the IRC channels?
    If you join #TDWTF, you'll automatically be redirected to #codelove, which is where its denizens currently reside.  If you join #TDWTFMafia, you'll get a topic instructing you to join #somafia.  Most of the denizens of the former #TDWTFMafia populate StackOverflow now.



  • @e4tmyl33t said:

    Sophos has turned into a steaming pile of garbage over the last few years, same with McAfee.

    I've not used Sophos so can't comment but would agree that McAfee got progressively worse.  Mind you, I thought Trend was the greatest thing ever when we started using it and that seems to have gone downhill also.

    For personal use on Windows I had no problems with AVG free.  Now I've become a fosstard I'm relaxing smugly in the (probably mistaken) assumption that I don't need AV so I go without.



  • @Fred Foobar said:

    or 3) the free AV of your choice,

    what would you use?

    ClamAV, it's in Ubuntu and Arch's repos. I haven't touched any other distribution lately, so I can't say if it's more widespread than that.



  • @e4tmyl33t said:

    Sophos has turned into a steaming pile of garbage over the last few years, same with McAfee
     

    What do you mean McAfee getting worse over the years? I distinctly remember it being a POS in 1995 on my DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 system!



  • McAfee is a huge steaming pile of shit. Use Alwil Avast! free or ESET NOD32 if you want/need a paid solution. We're switching to NOD32 here at work in the near future; McAfee hasn't switched to the Vista+ Microsoft Action Center reporting, so can't report its status in Windows 7, other than out-of-date. Avast!, a free product, does not have this problem. Neither does NOD32.

    McAfee is also running 10 background processes consuming some 250+ MB of RAM (private bytes, per Process Explorer) and sometimes consumes a full core on my workstation under moderate file activity. I have also seen it reduce a Celeron M laptop to complete immobility. So de-rate anything you're considering running it on by a quarter GB of RAM and at least a GHz of processor speed.


  • Garbage Person

     Sick and twisted fact:

    Symantec EndPoint Security is the best antivirus solution currently on the market.

     

    EVERYTHING else has gone downhill significantly in the last several years, whereas Symantec has cleaned up its act and only dicks around and fails mildly (Norton is alright, but Symantec still dicks around consumers, so it's not ideal)



  •  I would @Weng said:

     Sick and twisted fact:

    Symantec EndPoint Security is the best antivirus solution currently on the market.

     

    EVERYTHING else has gone downhill significantly in the last several years, whereas Symantec has cleaned up its act and only dicks around and fails mildly (Norton is alright, but Symantec still dicks around consumers, so it's not ideal)

    Sorry, I use this at work and it is useless. AVG free edition vastly superior product (but not available for commercial use). Symantec antivirus product cause a lot of issues with file access times and have been measured to increase file access times by as much as 2000%. No joke.

    On the free side of things I would recommend AVG free, minimal performance loss, but does suffer from poor to no heuristic detection.

    On the paid side of things, Avira is currently No.1 when it comes to virus detections, however I have no about performance costs. Microsoft OneCare would you believe is currently No. 2 for detections, (And No.1 for the least false positives).

     

    See Latest AV-Comparatives test results: http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report22.pdf



  •  I used to have Kaspersky for a short while, and it appeared to be a friendly, stable piece of software with a very low system impact.


  • Garbage Person

    AVG suffers hugely from being INCREDIBLY PROLIFIC with regard to false-positives. I have no fewer than 2500 files on my SAN that it thinks are infected - and they aren't. And I never said Symantec was any good - I just said it was the least shit. Slower file access times is one thing (BTW, you can turn off the access-time scanning to fix that problem anyway) - nuking someone's iTunes executables, or on more than one occasion vital Windows binaries is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT league of failure along the lines of "Did you even TEST THAT?"


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