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My father is asking me about commercial antivirus packages because he doesn't like my Internet security solution of not using Windows. Does anyone have any idea about where to go for ratings of antivirus software programs?

Here you are. Less of a review site than a list of features and price, but should still be useful.

It looks like BitDefender is pretty much the best option of the listed. Has hourly updates and the only thing it doesn't feature is email protection, which shouldn't bother your father if he's wise about what he opens and uses a good client. And it's the cheapest to order.


And here's their in-depth review of BitDefender. You can get a review for any of the listed software by clicking on their name in the first link.

For the average home user, I'd think email protection would be of the utmost importance, simply due to the real risk that they're perhaps not as wise about what they open as an experienced user. I'd simply recommend he save his money and get AVG, and make sure he's using Firefox/Thunderbird.

I've only used the free version, but my experiences of Avira have been very, very good. http://www.avira.com

I use Avast and I mean, I go through some of the nastiest raunchiest fucking porn sites. I click on all those pop up ads and the like all the time, and I have never gotten a virus or anything. It updates constantly and it just runs in the background and never causes a fuss.

AV Comparatives is what I use, particularly their retrospective survey.

Short answer: For free stuff, Avira or Avast. Avoid AVG like the plague. ESET's Nod32 is simply the only way to go if you have the money to spend.

Does anyone know about the level of convenience with these packages? All of the reviews so far focus entirely on detection rates, for which there are a lot of packages which are pretty close in performance. But even a product with a high detection rate can be a huge pain in the ass if the interface and configuration suck.

AVG, and to a lesser extent Avast, have very intuitive and simple interfaces. The systems are lacking bloat like that nightmare in binary that is Norton, but they're still functional enough to protect a system from just about any threat in the virus community. Coupled with Spybot, you can't really lose.

If you don't fancy going that route, because even the minimalist virus checkers can be resource hogs when all the bells and whistles are in play, then you can try something like VaccineDrive. There seems to be a growing market now for USB flash drives that act as separate computer systems that constantly scan your computer without taxing it's resources as a background scanning set-up in Windows would. They're relatively cheap at about £50/$100 for such a device and tend to use a micro-version of Linux to avoid themselves being compromised. I feel this would be an easier option than messing around with various software suites. My brother's Windows XP installation recently died because Norton thought it was a great idea to almost China Syndrome the processor on start up.

I use AVG Free Edition, and it works wonderfully. The new 8.0 version integrates anti-spyware as well, and doesn't seem to have 7.5's problem with requiring a restart every update or two.

Darth Wong wrote:Does anyone know about the level of convenience with these packages? All of the reviews so far focus entirely on detection rates, for which there are a lot of packages which are pretty close in performance. But even a product with a high detection rate can be a huge pain in the ass if the interface and configuration suck.

For the most part, the antivirus portion of these products is fairly simple - you download/buy and run them. I'll give my impression of the ones myself and customers have used:

Antivir - doesn't do scheduled complete system scans by default, and sometimes the updating stalls (though it always fixes itself in a few days, and has happened a lot less recently). Configuring the scheduler is done through double clicking on the icon -> administration -> scheduler. The free version has popups during the update which may annoy people.

Avast - More complex, but IIRC it does scheduled scans out of the box (or download, if you prefer). It has a routine need for manual updates, at least compared to AVG or Antivir.

AVG - Too many viruses just fly under this thing's radar, but it's probably the simplest of the free ones. It runs scheduled checks (8 am was the default when I last used it).

Norman - Can't really comment too much, except that I didn't have issues with uninstalling it. Was simpler than Norton or McAfee. None of the customer calls I had with someone who had Norman called because of virus/spyware/rootkit reasons, which is more than I can say for AVG/McAfee/Norton/Trend Micro)

McAfee - Does not like to let go - uninstalling it normally doesn't work. Otherwise, it works completely out of the box. It tends to be a bit of a system hog.

Norton - If you love your grandfather, you will not inflict this on him. Be wary of any security product that has its own security vulnerability history. Will slow most any computer to a crawl.

PC-cillin (Trend Micro) - Apparently the license needs to be deactivated on a computer before you can install it on another computer. This may sound okay, but keep in mind that if something gets by it and trashes your system, you have a $50 coaster. Things get by pc cillin rather often.

F secure - it's been a long time since I used this, but it was a solid product then.

Nod32 I have little experience with, but it's slick, unobtrusive and fast.

You can disable those popups during Antivir's update, but you'll need to give a computer layman pretty detailed instructions to do so.

Avira AntiVir is not a resource hog and the interface is easy to use and logical. I find Avast a fucking pain in the ass to use because the interface is confusing if you want to poke around it. One of the reasons I've liked AntiVir so greatly is that in addition to kickass detection rates, its lightweight on the machine and simple, clean and easy to use.

To save myself some time fiddling, how does one turn off the bloody popups with Antivir?

Darth Wong wrote:Does anyone know about the level of convenience with these packages? All of the reviews so far focus entirely on detection rates, for which there are a lot of packages which are pretty close in performance. But even a product with a high detection rate can be a huge pain in the ass if the interface and configuration suck.

Avast has the worst UI known to man. The default UI is indistinct (everything is silver, with silver buttons, that highlight silver when you mouseover them), Unituitive (the icons are small and it's far from obvious what they do, it looks like the UI for a media player, not an AV program), and uncommunicative (there are no labels on anything, and no tooltips, or if there are tooltips they have a humongous delay that I haven't had the patience to wait through)..

It's seriously a masterclass in exactly how not to design a usable piece of software.

You can change that UI into a better one wthin the stock program.




You can turn off Antivir's popups through instructions shown here:


http://www.elitekiller.com/files/disabl ... ir_nag.htm



If you have XP Pro, use the second set of instructions for Pro, they're much easier.

Shinova wrote:You can change that UI into a better one wthin the stock program.

Yeah, but do do that you'll need to figure out where the skins option is, in the worst UI known to man.

You shouldn't have to change the default UI of a program to make it faintly useful, it should start out with the basic and most usable UI as the default, and leave the twiddly wankery to people who want to pour lemon juice in their paper cuts.

Shinova wrote:You can change that UI into a better one wthin the stock program.

The mere fact that you need to do it in the first place relegates that software from something decent or even good to absolute shit. It is a mark of the company's stupidity that they are still sticking to that UI design and probably have not fired the people who designed it.

My time is too damned valuable to spend on learning to compensate for some braindead fuckwit's incompetence on my free time.

Also worth mentioning that the other shipped Avast skin, whilst it's not that stupid silver on silver colour scheme, still has no labels on anything and has small and indistinct buttons. (the "start scan" button, for example, is about the smallest one on the window).