AVG Users

[Charlie Bravo]

Chaps,

I've noticed quite a few of you use AVG Anti Virus software on your PC's.

I have had the pleasure of sorting out a PC riddled with trojans etc that AVG let through the massive holes in it's net and here are some comments on AVG taken from elsewhere on the internet superhighway of love: (excuse the grammer, I simply hit copy and paste)

when i fix other people's pc's a lot of them have avg on there and nod32/kasp find tons that avg can't detect.

AVG is to viruses what Britain is to immigrants.

AVG is absolute gash, it actually annoys me every time I see some forumite say "Go with AVG it's rly rly good". It's not, it's about the worst for detection and cleaning.


May I suggest treating your PC to Kaspersky Anti Virus available at OcUK as an OEM product for £8.21. I don't mean to sound like an advert but AVG is crap.

[Quixoticish]

I've always used NOD32 myself if I ever install a virus scanner, although I find common sense goes a lot further and uses less memory as well. It's cheap (NOD32 that is, common sense is free!) uses hardly any memory, is easily customisable and doesn't bloat your system with rubbish. And it actually detects and removes the nasties.

[Garry Russell]

Thank's CB

Sound advice...........without a doubt

Garry

[speedbird591]

AVG is the preferred FREE AV of the gurus on the PC Advisor website and many of them are IT professionals. Having said that, none of the free AVs are particularly good compared to pay programs, which is what you would expect. There is a good thread here from the PC Advisor forum where the AVG champions defend their AV against a recent comparative test. It shows that there are as many opinions as there are AVs but it makes interesting reading.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forums/index ... &forumid=1

I agree totally with CB that Kaspersky (and NOD32) show the best results of any AVs but AVG is as good (or as bad!) as any of the free ones. Norton also comes out top in many of the tests and all of us ex-users know we wouldn't touch that again! As ChrisH also points out, common sense is the most effective protection from malware and an AV should be a second line defence. The argument really is whether to go pay or use free. The sensible thing to do is to pay the money, but it is not always available. If you decide to use a free product then AVG is probably no better or worse at catching malware than any of the other free ones.

From my personal POV, I have been using AVG on our three computers for a while with no problems but have been meaning to increase my protection. CB's advice is a timely reminder and I think it's time to give Kaspersky a look.

Ian

[Buggyman]

Having ditched Norton a long time ago I now use AVG Professional and have no complaints at all. However it does pay to double check once in a while and I use Avast to cross-check once a week or so. The first time I did this Avast came up with a series of Trojan warnings that seemed to prove that AVG wasn't up to the job. On checking out the actual files I found that they were original Norton files which were still embedded in my system. Since then Avast has not found any other 'nasties'.

I think that, in the end,it all comes down to personal preference, common sense and always taking sensible precautions.



Allan

[TSR2]

Completely agree with CB. For those of you with more than one PC in the house, many of the payware vendours now license their products for 3 or more home PC's for one price. The reason may of these freeware products are out there is to get a customer base, once they have that, it makes them an attractive purchase for one of the big comercial companies, and therefore makes the owners of the freeware companies very rich.

To be absolutely honest though, it all depends on how you use your PC and what you expose it to. As an example I never use torent or peer to peer, so my exposure is quite low. Also where you put your email address, forums etc, as the address can be scooped up by bots and then used in mass email. I very rarely (once or twice a week) get spam on my personal email, where as we all get tons of crap by the our cbfsteam email address as that address is publicly available.

So sensible use, with a good program and you will be fine.

[Nigel H-J]

Many thanks CB, will go for this one as had AVG put on for me.

Went to their web-site and it has been reduced from 24 to 12 GBP for the downloaded version (Anti-virus only).

Or the full kit for 18.06 GBP.

Offer only until 11 February.......So hurry!!

http://www.kaspersky.com/store

Nigel.

[speedbird591]

I've just checked on the Kaspersky site and they are doing a half-price offer again (still?). So I've decided to take the plunge and have now uninstalled everything else that I mentioned and installed a 30 day trial of Kaspersky Internet Security instead. If I like the interface, I'll purchase the 3 PC licence.

It's doing a full scan now, so it'll be interesting to see if my cheapo protection let anything slip through. It's more likely to find something on cyberbrat's laptop than mine, though :roll:

I'll report back tomorrow :tab:

Ian

[Nigel H-J]

Waiting with interest Ian.

Nigel.

[speedbird591]

Waiting with interest Ian.

Me too! At the moment it's done 39% with a predicted finish at 1400, so hopefully I can let you know before I go to work at 1415 Nothing found yet

BTW, Nigel - the AV alone still doesn't deal with your original question about spyware in the other thread. So you'll still need some protection from that, whereas the Kaspersky Internet Security claims to protect from that stuff as well.

Ian