Avira AntiVir - best antivirus program of this or any generation - and it's free!

[c627627]

Hot diggidy, Avast is slow, but that's all right, I'm looking forward to seeing what it finds.

If there is a feature suggestion page for Avast, I suggest asking for

1. Pause/Resume scan button and
2. Some sort of a better visual display of percentage of scan completed. They have a tiny micro two digit % completed text only.

 

[Giz]

Interesting to see how they compare to each other. How's that scan coming along...

I find it quite funny though that ppl spend $$$$$'s on their rigs, then hunt round for freeware antivirus programs to protect them.

I used Norton Internet Security for a few years, then tried free Kaspersky for a while which i found a pain in the a*s, now using Bullguard Internet Security. It's fairly light on resources compared to Norton, cheap enough and you get 2 months free trial.

 

[c627627]

Well nothing is going to happen to our rigs, it's the software that needs protectin' .

Antivir happens to be free, but before I jumped on the Antivir ship a while back, I tested full versions of all major antivirus programs, so it's not about the cost. My scan is 50% done. It's a 101 GB folder. Antivir would have been done with it by now, but that's all right, it's not about the speed.

There better be a log file somewhere when it finishes...

 

[tenchi86]

Honestly, just been using Antivir and Kaspersky for a few years now and was growing bored of them. (AVG before those but its fallen behind). Antivir itself is probably the best detection unit there is, however it was a pretty annoying/intrusive application IMO. Bitdefender is not as good at scanning (Still not bad, 99% of Windows viruses, 96.5 overall) but it is much less annoying and does not seem to touch my system resources. (Yes, it's configured to be pretty low foot print based on my system so maybe that is why.)

Over the years though I have changed my stance a lot. I used to be behind a brick wall of a firewall and had startup and access scans all activated. More of a minimalistic stance now and to be honest my PC is running better then ever since I don't always have those scans running or annoying windows asking what is allowed and what is not. So bitdefender being free, and simple just works well for me.


http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2008_02.php comparison.

 

[TempliNocturnus]

Last time I used Avast, it had something like 7 processes running. Reminded me of symantec.

 

[nd4spdbh2]

Honestly, just been using Antivir and Kaspersky for a few years now and was growing bored of them. (AVG before those but its fallen behind). Antivir itself is probably the best detection unit there is, however it was a pretty annoying/intrusive application IMO. Bitdefender is not as good at scanning (Still not bad, 99% of Windows viruses, 96.5 overall) but it is much less annoying and does not seem to touch my system resources. (Yes, it's configured to be pretty low foot print based on my system so maybe that is why.)

Over the years though I have changed my stance a lot. I used to be behind a brick wall of a firewall and had startup and access scans all activated. More of a minimalistic stance now and to be honest my PC is running better then ever since I don't always have those scans running or annoying windows asking what is allowed and what is not. So bitdefender being free, and simple just works well for me.


http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2008_02.php comparison.

this is the stance i have taken, ust to have a firewall, norton..... now i got my router as a hardware firewall, and dont even bother with antivirus. i watch what i download and dont let peeps mess with my comp and havnt had problems in the past 2 yrs. granted i do reinstall windows every 6-8 months but its due to it getting loaded up with all of my files... i do however run an adaware scan and ccleaner run everynow and then.

 

[muddocktor]

I'm waiting to see the results you get with Avast, c6. I've been using Avast on my main rig for a few years now and no virus problems. I had tried Avir on a crunching rig and got ****ed about the nag screeen and dumped it. But since you have a way to kill the nag screeen I would give it another try if it works better than Avast. I have a few crunchers using AVG presently that I plan to change my antivirus product out on soon.

 

[c627627]

It's done, I'll need this evening to do a meticoulous comparison of every virus found (there were dozens). That's primary. Then we'll look at other aspects of usage.


Should there be anything that Avast found and Avira missed, the good thing about that would be that Avira has been very good in emailing back analysys of files I uploaded to them that were not detected by Avira but were detected by others. I suppose we could do the same with Avast, if they have something like that like Avira does.

 

[petteyg359]

They do. The one time I managed to obtain a virus that Avast didn't detect, I sent it to them (forget the email, but it's listed on their site), and got a reply back in less than two hours saying they had received the file and were "investigating" it So far I've never sent any "feature request" emails to them, so I don't know what their response to that would be.

EDIT:

When sending a question, please supply the following information:

* What operating system are you using? (e.g. Windows 2000 Server...)
* What version of avast! are you using? (e.g. 4.0.160 - you can find this information in the "About avast!..." dialog)
* What version of VPS file are you using? (e.g. 0303-10, 04/15/2003 - you can find this information in "About avast!..." dialog)
* What is your basic hardware configuration? (e.g. Intel Pentium III 800 MHz, 128 MB RAM)
* How do you connect to Internet? (e.g. dial-up, using a proxy server, using a firewall...)
* What is your e-mail client? (e.g. Outlook, Outlook Express, IncrediMail...)
* Do you use other security software? Which one? (e.g. Norton Antivirus...)
* What are the steps to reproduce the bug again? (such as what was the system doing at the time of the problem...)
* Do any error messages appear? If yes, what exactly do they say?

If you have any suspicious files that are not detected by the latest version of our antivirus programs, you can send them to [email protected]. The ideal way to send such files is to compress them as a ZIP file with the password 'virus' (so that the attachment is not deleted by some other antivirus software on the way).

 

[c627627]

Well I've started and right off the bat, comparison of my first folder has 15 of them detected by Avast and 2 by Antivir.

HOWEVER: 13 of them are FALSE POSITIVES:

Avira writes back:
The file ***.exe has been determined to be 'FALSE POSITIVE'. In particular this means that this file is not malicious but a false alarm. Detection is removed from our virus definition file (VDF) with the version: 6.39.0.39.

Being up to date with false positives is also important.

 

[c627627]

My second folder contains a virus Avast completely missed.

However, it also contains one Avast detected AND it was not a false positive. Avira will get back with the results in a few days. The file was suspicious enough to be flagged for analysis. If it does turn out to be a false positive, then Avast would not be a winner considering how many false positives they hit this far.

 

[c627627]

There is a specific file that repeatedly comes up - a real virus Trojan horse TR/Spy.204800.B, not detected at all by Avast.

It is not looking good for Avast, their definitions are not better thus far, they do not appear to use less resources. Avira does offer real time live protection, plus little things such as Pause/Resume button.

Pause/Resume is important because you can pause to check something real quick, then resume, whereas Avast locks your computer for half a day with no Pause button, doing the scans slower on top of that.

 

[c627627]

Yeah, I think the game is over, a bunch of false positives in the next folder by Avast, but more troubling, they missed three Trojan horses in the next folder that Antivir caught:
Trojan horse TR/Spy.204800.B
Trojan horse TR/Agent.92801
Trojan horse TR/Agent.2230272

 

[petteyg359]

Suppose I could try AntiVir. I've only tried a few free ones (Panda, AVG, and Avast, all of which were better than paid alternatives) and Avast happened to be the best of those.

 

[c627627]

Oh yeah -- I am abandoning the comparison as the next folder contained a really big one that Avast missed and AntiVir caught:

[DETECTION] Contains a detection pattern of the (dangerous) backdoor program BDS/Hupigon3.AROS Backdoor server programs

 

[muddocktor]

OK, I went and reinstalled Avir on the same cruncher I had it on before and followed your steps to kill the nag screen. I had to install some new Antivirus on it anyways as I was still running AVG 7.5 on that Seti cruncher.

 

[c627627]

People should remember to uninstall the old program first, running two antivirus programs simultaneously = problem.

 

[muddocktor]

Yep, I know that. When I uninstalled Avira last time (around April) I just installed AVG 7.5 back on it. But I have 4-5 more machines I have to upgrade from 7.5 on too and I don't like AVG8 nearly as much as 7.5 (bigger resource hog, IMO).

 

[tenchi86]

It's funny. It seems once these programs get some fame they always start to turn into bloat ware. I hope Antivir does not follow this route also.

 

[BossBorot]

This thread is just what I needed. I havent had a virus in god knows how long but its good to know you have the best protection. Plus ive been running avg 7.5 and it just hasnt been cutting it like it used to imho.