Re: What is a good free antivirus protection program? Is AVG a good free program?

On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 22:08:07 -0600, "Charlie Tame" wrote:
>"cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)" wrote

>> Re-installing what - the av, or the OS?

>>>the usual result is all hell breaking loose with bits left over, bits
>>>working and absolutely nothing one can rely on.

That's one reason I don't like av that are messy and cluttered with
uninstallers that don't work properly, particularly where the vendor
has deliberatly added DRM logic to deny service.

This alone is a very compelling reason to avoid Norton AV, IMO.

>However from what I have seen NAV and McAfee are often installed by OEM's,
>Vendors, or included on ISP set up disks because they are "Famous" names

Norton and McAfee are the knee-jerk choices due to the "famous brand"
effect, and are mainly spread through dumb retail. Dumb retailers
aren't going to talk about best-of-breed products that can be bought
directly via the 'net with no resale markup opportunity, nor are they
going to talk about free choices that also make no money. The same
goes for advertising-driven PC magazines, etc.

Because of this retail BS factor, our knee-jerk reaction tends the
other way, i.e. we may be biased against these products.

The use of the names "Norton" and "McAfee" as branding is interesting
retail BS in itself. Peter Norton was a utility guru in the DOS age,
but was on record as denying that viruses exist even as they had
started to spread, so he's an odd choice of figurhead for av cred; in
any case, he "left the building" long ago.

John McAfee was one of the early av pioneers, but his company was
merged into Network Associates long ago, along with Dr Solomons - in
fact it was the Dr Solomons engine that survived as the main product
line until further development left both legacy code bases behind.

The biggest problem with most OEM-bundled av is the value is poor
(30-days to 90-days is typical), so that effectively all you get is
feeware lock-in (especially when coupled with a bad uninstaller). An
exception used to be 12-month Trend PC-cillin that went with some
motherboards. As a system builder, my policy is to disregard and
discard any bundled av that runs for less than 12 months, if the user
can use a time-unlimited freeware av instead.

>It is therefore my opinion that Leythos' observations are much more to do
>with either the user base themselves or the fact that they are better
>"Educated" as a result of his efforts. Either that or they are too damned
>scared to admit problems due to getting their machines back "Wiped" a few
>times :) (Sorry, couldn't resist that).

That's what I call "punitive support", and it's one of several BS
approaches that pervade IT. It's a classic dumb-retail and/or big-OEM
thing that can be used in both 1-call and 0-call forms The game is
rigged to entice sales on the promise of support, then limit the
actual support resource drain to one and none calls, respectively.

The 1-call version: PC is promptly serviced as promised, but is
returned with everything wiped and restored to factory defaults. The
traumatized client does not partake of "support" ever again.

The 0-call version: PC is shipped with a crappy OEM "restore" CD that
can do nothing except destroy the installation and replace it with
factory defaults. Support calls then go like this...

"My PC has problem XYZ..."
' Did you run our Restore CD? '
"No, that will wipe my system!"
' Well, if you won't follow our advice, we can't help you ' <click>

>As for judging a product by update frequency it is not really a good way to
>do it. One could arrange for daily updates where little changes or weekly
>ones that provide lots of new protection. With AVG the frequency of checks
>is user defined AFAIK, how often the updates actually change I have not
>studied but they seem pretty frequent.

Yes, I have to agree there - in any case, on that metric, NAV may be
rather poor, if they are still releasing updates once a week.

I find that most seldom-updated tools (e.g. Avast's free
general-purpose malware cleaner) are pretty useless, and that most
good av have regular updates, but some tools buck this trend - for
example, Stinger is limited in what it catches and is seldom updated,
yet it often finds things that other scanners have missed.

I've been watching the WMF debacle with interest, and neither AVG nor
F-Prot haven't been keeping up with things as well as many other av.

OTOH, I've seen some scanning results for slippery malware, and the
results have been interesting and varied, with little correlation
between fee/freeware status and quality.

The surprise product has been AntiVir, which has been doing quite well
across the board. My own experience with it backs this up; good
detection rates, and the product is admirably flexible in use - it can
be used purely as an on-demand scanner, or resident, it survives
"scrape-over" and works from Bart-boot CDR, and it updates easily.



>---------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
Don't pay malware vendors - boycott Sony
>---------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
.

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