What is best Antivirus program that will not slow or conflict

AVG free is, I am afraid, a get-what-you-pay-for virus scanner. My wife used it, until I convinced her to also use CA Antivirus (as I do). It found a handful of nasties that AVG was clueless about. A small investment ($20 a year) goes a long way...

I use NOD32 the best by far - don't even bother with Norton, it's bloated and a complete waste of money, I still got a virus when using it that NOD picked up straight away.

I miss the days when virus could cause your computer to literally fall apart. Gave threads like this a bit more levity. I'd like to make 101 points
1. your compy is not a toaster.
2. your compy only does what a human has told it to
3. your compy is not a toaster.
4. not all open source requires you to speak geek
5. listen to your local nerd, they do know what they're talking about, even if you don't understand all of it. If you're completely lost, hire a translator, we're usually the ones who are dating said nerds, or married to them

You can also improve performance a bit by configuring your A/V client to not scan the SL cache folder.

Oh yeah, and like everyone says.. avoid Suckmantic like the plague!

I have pretty much use all the ones you mention. If i feel something might be behaving abnormally....i will run those programs independently one at a time. Don't use Nortons!! I ditched that months ago, it really drains memory and slows the system down when using in the background whilst running SL

Would also recommed Registry Mechanic and Trojan Horse Detector & Remover developed by "Simply Super Software"....this particular program has detected numerous exploit attempts and successfully removed them.

Above all else "common sense" and NOT opening files/emails from an unrecognisable senders is a MUST.

And don't let your mails come in graphical mode. When a mail shows a nice pictures, it can be located on a website somewhere.... and with that there is a connection to a place somewhere on the web, which may be used for things you don't want.

When I receive a mail from someone I trust, I can always decide to show the graphics in it.... but mostly that is not needed at all.

Morwen.

Well, think through the logic here. Nowadays, when viruses arrive they immediately stealth themsleves from detectors: if they are active, then adding a detector does no good because the virus infects the detector, adding a "do not scan..." list to the config. The most freuquent use for viruses, to the author, is in assembling bot-nets of zombie PCs that they can control to attack corporate subjects of their blackmail efforts. Therefore, they don't want you to know you have a virus - and for 99% of the time, you have no idea there's one present. Then one day your machine is slow for 10 sec, or won't shut down, because it's been used to attack the Pepsi website or something like that. You won't see this on a regular, simple scan.

Then there's the very weird situation with US anti-virus companies: some virus writing setups are suing the US firms for detecting their payload, because they like to claim it's not a virus. Ever wondered why people keep recommending non-US virus companies, such as Grisioft (Czech Republic), Sophos (UK) or F-Prot (Iceland... yes really)? The answer is, because they can make their scanners more rigorous, being out of reach of BS lawsuits.

When I come across people who confidently claim they have no viruses, I have two approaches. One is to attempt to run Trend Micro Housecall (housecall.trendmicro.com) which scans your machine from within a web page. If it won't run - chances are, you're infected. The other is to build a fresh machine on a spare hard disk, do nothing to it but load up AVG from a CD, and then plug their hard disk into it as a non-bootable drive, and THEN scan it. This is the AV equivalent of taking off and nuking the site from orbit; it commonly throws up anywhere forom 6 to 10 active, malicious payloads.

I recommend AVG, as others have here. In the wild, I come across Kaspersky a little more than I do NOD, but both are excellent.

Norton is a virus!

I use a variation of Norton supplied by my ISP, I do have it toned down quite a bit and have never had any problem with it. I do however run a full system check every couple of weeks with three other ad/spy/virus prog's and they regularly find stuff that the main Norton programme apparently missed. Having said that the stuff they find is of minimal threat and I'm guessing Norton chose to ignore them or I've got it set a little to low. Whatever the answer I'd say I've got it about right, an element of protection with minimal disruption (If I had Norton set at it's highest protection it would be simply unusable..I'd be lucky to get on the net let alone use it)

Avast! is great....and free. Doesn't slow me down at all.

Good Take

After a disaster with MCaFee (I don't know what it is meant to be anti - but it isn't viruses) I have changed to Kaspersky - any chance of some tips on how to set the forewall rules up so it likes Second Life?

I use Zonealarm Pro. If I install a new version of SL, it just asks me if "this changed program' is allowed to access the Internet. After selecting "Yes", SL runs without any problems.

There shouldn't be much to it with any Firewall I assume?

Morwen.

i use this too, but it does slow my inworld experience.

Adding my vote for NOD32.

After finally getting all McAfee out of my machine, I put in AVG free. much better. Faster startups, less to close out in Task Manager when running SL. I use that and the Windows Firewall. that's enough for me.

http://www.clamwin.com

you can't go wrong with opensource software, plus the linux version is one of the antivirus that are used on mailservers.

Nothing that run in the background , which also means scans are manual.

Kaspersky has yet to make a fully-working 64-bit version. >_<

After some reading and fiddling I was amazed at how much I was able to disable on my machine. It makes a big difference, even when I don't run SL. If I plan on running SL and no other application, which is usually the case now, I even shut down Windows Explorer.
I recently installed a printer on my computer after not having one. I was getting befuddled when it didn't work and kept getting the Print Spooler error. it took me a little while to figure out I had disabled it.

OMG you just have to love it. How about those abbreviations that we have no clue what they are. I have a link somewhere that tells what all of them are, but cant find the thing right now.

I use CA eTrust too ($20 a year) and have since the inspeption of time. I did try Norton once and just about threw my pc out the window. You might want to check with your ISP and see if they have a free anti-virus software that you can try out. Also go to download.com and install Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destory. Run them!!! They are both free and there are a ton of other things in there you might want to look at too. There are also a ton of aniti-virus programs that you can try for 30-days or so before you buy them.

My business partner let her anti-virus software expire and she wound up with over 400 viruses on our business computer (idiot that she is, me thinks now-chuckles). It cost over $200 to have them removed.

+1

I avoid Norton bloatware, it's a major system resource hog. I love Nod32, it runs very little on system resources but scan and covers more areas then any anti virus software i've used to date(not one i haven't tried in other words).

Second choice would be Avast. It's 'Home' version is free.
http://www.avast.com/

You can't beat the price on AVG, I just hate that it gives false positives from time to time. It's only annoyance, but it does it's job.

Firewall software first choice was always Sygate, since Symantec(Norton) bought them out end of 06' Sygate has ceased and now will be more Norton bloatware.

I use Comodo for a firewall. Comes in 32 and 64 bit versions. Another great freebie!
http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/

You can't beat the price on AVG, I just hate that it gives false positives from time to time. It's only annoyance, but it does it's job.

Same here! I love AVG Free!

A simple test I did was interesting about the "stopping power" of AV Software.

A friend of mine runs Norton. I use AVG Free.

We both created a text file with an extra extension of EXE. So the file was "TextFile.txt.exe". Windows only shows you the "txt" part, not the "exe" part.

We sent the file to each other.

Norton never caught that hidden extension. AVG Picked up on it right away.

Since then, he's reformated, reinstalled, and uses AVG Free now and hasn't had a virus since then.

'Course that could change anytime the way he downloads stuff.

Another vote for AVG

Not sure if they still are but CA (Computer Associates) was a big dog in corporate computing years ago, my mother used to work for them when I was little, so yes we are talking a good 2 decades. You know about the time when data came on cassette tape or 5.25 Inch floppy (Literally!). Ever find a cassette tape with data on it and try to play it on an old tape deck? Not a pretty sound.

I use a version of CA InoculateIT. Pretty simple but still has daily signauture updates