AVAST subscription renewal...should I?

[SHRED]

I have had AVAST Pro for a few years now. My current subscription expires soon.
Lately it seems to be more and more a resource hog. It takes a long time to load and update at startup.

I am open to other programs for my older WIN XP pro system.


thanks

[dballance]

1. I use F-Secure. Lightweight and reliable.

It's a small company out of Finland. Often they seem to have updates for new threats before the big boys. Also, they have it for my Win box and my Mac boxes. One stop shopping.

Since they're not US based no NSA backdoors either

[JBoy]

2. I've used the free version of Avast for several years.

Never had a problem. And I'm on Vista!

[AgingAmerican]

3. I've used AVG for years, never had a problem with it

The box I'm on now is linux MINT, no antivirus needed hehehehe

[RoccoR5955]

10. you wouldn't want to bet on that, would you?

There are viruses for Linux. Just not as many as there are for Windoze.

[AgingAmerican]

13. Sure

Ill bet I've never used anti-virus with Linux, sure. I don't worry about it.

[hobbit709]

4. I use a combination of Malwarebytes Antimalware and Microsoft Security Essentials.

Found Malwarebytes on sale for $10. One time purchase price-free updates forever. MSE is one of the few things MS has done that works without being a resource hog and it's free.

[ChromeFoundry]

5. +1 for Microsoft Security Essentials

it just works with a small footprint

[RoccoR5955]

11. MSE= the worst rated security package

Unless you read the trades where Mickeysoft is the sponsor.

[ChromeFoundry]

16. Thanks for your unsupported opinion

A link would have been nice, but you probably won't be finding anything to uphold your actual claims (short of a study funded by one of the competitors that are losing ground to MSE).

MSE is in the Top 5 for performance and low resource utilization.
MSE was ranked 9th in all commercial (36 paid & free utilities) AV & Trojan detection and removal.
CNET and Tom's Hardware are hardly paid sponsors of MS.
No free product come even close to offering the same protection levels that MSE offers.

True, MSE is rather slow at providing protection from the new Zero-Day threats and the absolute very newest threats (and they promised to correct this in the very near term).. but if you really want to have 50% of your CPU cycles doing nothing but scanning for threats and dogging your productivity... be my guest to buy Norton's hamster-wheel security product because it is the top rated, but be sure to monitor your CPU and memory consumption when your Apps hear that giant sucking sound. MSE works perfectly for 99.9% of users out there.

[RoccoR5955]

17. who rated this?

Microsoft?
Funny, PC Magazine, CNET, Consumersearch.com, AV-Test.org, and ICSA Labs all rate MS Security Essentials poorly.

AV-Test has lots of results from a lot of other AV/antimalware vendors, and ICSA is THE definitive certification lab for antivirus/antimalware software. ICSA doesn't even have MS Security Essentials (the home product) certified. It does, however, have the enterprise version, Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection as being certified though, but we are not talking about that.

Most of the time, I don't do homework for people. I expect them to do a little searching, because most of the time at work I spend spoon feeding people information. I kind of thought that people here knew how to use google or duckduckgo to search for things, but I guess I was wrong.

The link to ICSA labs is : http://www.icsalabs.com The link to AV-Test is: http://www.AV-Test.org

So there you go. Perhaps I also took for granted my 25+ years of PC support experience.
Sorry.

[ChromeFoundry]

18. I'm not arguing that it is not the 'Best'

but when is having the 'best' worth making your environment sluggish and prone to BSODs for an added 0.0033% protection? I have to agree with Joe Blackbird's rebuttal to the AV-Test and how it was conducted. If only 0.0033% of all users were affected by the targets of the content that MSE failed to catch... I'd have to say that this is most likely good enough for me.

https://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2013/01/16/lessons-learned-from-the-latest-test-results.aspx?Redirected=true

Yes, I too have 25+ years in IT. Sorry if my previous post sounded like a snarky attack directed at you - not intended.

[RoccoR5955]

19. That .0033% is only relevant...

until you become one of the .0033%

No problem with the last post, I should apologize for my last post, which may have also seemed snarky, and was unintended as so.

[SHRED]

6. Malwarebytes

What does it do that MSE doesn't? Why run both?

thanks

[hobbit709]

7. Malware and viruses are not quite the same thing

An antivirus program doesn't necessarily catch a lot of malware because of the way it's written. using both gives you a much better chance of catching all of it. Also Malwarebytes can be run by using its Chameleon file and stopping processes that disable your security software.

Running more than one antivirus program at the same time can really bog down the computer and/or they fight each other and neither works right. You can run more than one antimalware program without them doing this.

[SHRED]

8. thanks

[Dash87]

9. Nope. Security software subs are a waste of money.

Microsoft's Security Essentials does the same thing all of these programs do for free.

[RoccoR5955]

12. No it doesn't

First of all MSE is slower than molasses in February.
Second, it misses a whole lot of things, like things in system restore volumes.
I can't think of others, but from the impartial reviews that I have seen, it performs quite poorly.

[Dash87]

15. I've had it for years. It's perfectly fine.

I also had Norton previously. The two don't seem any different.

As for speed, just run the program over night. Not a big deal. I didn't notice any system slow down with it. If there's any speed difference, it's not something anyone will ever notice.

I've never found an AV that is perfect. Norton misses some viruses as well. However, with MSE, you can't go wrong. It's the OP's best bet.

[mockmonkey]

14. I'm using the free version of Avast

I do the boot-time scan about every 2 weeks.

I also download the Microsoft Safety Scanner about the same.

"The Microsoft Safety Scanner is a free down loadable security tool that provides on-demand scanning and helps remove viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It works with your existing antivirus software."

http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx