What is the best antivirus software for Windows?
I am not looking for personal preferences, but actual evidence.
What is the best antivirus software for Windows?
I am not looking for personal preferences, but actual evidence.
What's your criteria for best?
rustedzeke (08-06-2012)
Subjective, I use Esset NOD antivirus myself but everyone swears by one brand. I use to use AVG as well, not bad. But difficult to ascertain false positives/negatives on these progams. Even the Antivirus reviews you find on the net are not universal in terms of a single clear brand as they all have different methodology and/or commericial intentions.
rustedzeke (08-06-2012)
OK thanks guys I guess it's back to the excel virtual hat method again..
Check out the colour coding from the Forum FAQ
rustedzeke (08-06-2012)
Personally i'd recommend Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes as a good combo. Nothing is 100% but i'm not paying an arm and a leg to someone to turn my PC into a sloth. I used to use AVG before it became too bloated a while back and before MSE came along. To some the choice is a religious one, be warned..
rustedzeke (08-06-2012)
thanks guys![]()
In answer to your question, it's cuz I'm a Moderator
The Mods and Admins look after the site and make sure that ne'er do wells don't do well.... As a result we tend to be spam free. Of course, most folk are pretty good at self moderating - HEXUS is one of the best forums for this I think.
It is hard to find any evidence that one single product is overall better than another. You only have to look at several reviews of AV products to see that winner is different from one test to another.
I've tried lots over the years and now use MSSE and it works well in my opinion, With the added bonus that it is free.
In general if you want a free one, AVG you can't go wrong with. For a paid one kaspersky isn't bad. Norton and macafee are also good but generally use alot more computer resources, but I could be wrong with newer versions.
Last edited by csgohan4; 09-06-2012 at 11:15 AM.
I use the Malwarebytes Pro resident scanner - around £10 to £15 for a lifetime license.
I consider AV to be the very last defence against best practice & lapses in end-user judgement. I also use...
- Firefox with NoScript, with additional options ticked, in particular the option "apply restrictions to trusted sites" - this does sometimes break things like credit card "securecode" prompts and other embedded objects.
- Software Restriction Policies - a built-in OS feature since XP. This allows me to limit me to only being able to run applications (.exe, .bat, .vbs etc) from specific areas. i.e. for any app I download, I have to manually move it to a specific directory for me to run it. I started using this when I accidentally ran something from a USB stick and MBAM noticed & blocked the malware.
- Use any PDF viewer except Adobe Reader. I use PDF X-Change. It still needs to be kept up-to-date.
- Keep your OS, apps and plugins up-to-date, specifically Flash.
- Uninstall Java if you don't need it. You probably don't.
There's a family friend that repeatedly kept having problems with malware while running AVG, which at the time was the most widely recommended AV app. He's absolutely clueless and cannot be trained. So, he's been running XP with SteadyState on his old PC for few years. When he inevitably gets infected with something, he just reboots and it has gone. Firefox (v2 or v3, I think) is set to not save passwords, so any malware would hopefully not get a chance to retrieve them. He used to rely on AV apps, but they're useless for someone like him.
I would have been very keen to see Microsoft make consumer Windows 8 run entirely within a hypervisor by default, changing the ctrl-alt-del combo to bring up a VM utility & control window. This way of working could cause slowness though, particularly in games. It would mean that System Restore could be removed from the OS, instead relying on snapshots with a hypervisor-maintained log of what the OS has done so that you can revert to an old snapshot. For example, it could know that driver X was installed on a particular date, along with 3 new autorun items that look a bit odd, so it could pre-select the most likely required snapshot date.
All AV apps suck. Some suck less than others.
http://www.av-comparatives.org/
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