For three years, I dutifully purchased and updated the latest and greatest from McAfee. By way of dialup modem, the downloads were slow. Once installed, McAfee regularly claimed to have intercepted all manner of viruses and detected the odd virus on my PC, every few months.
Since loading AVG about 2 years ago–and updating regularly–there’s been not one peep of intercepted or detected viruses. I’m talking none and I open a fair number of attachments (after saving to disk and scanning.)
Can AVG be THAT much better than McAfee? How to explain the difference? My usage has not changed and I’m guessing the virus threat level hasn’t either. FWIW, AVG is free. McAfee is not.
(MODS: I hope to keep this factually based.)
I’m going to happen a guess, consideing all anti-virus software is looking at code the same way and looking for the same thing, all anti-virus software is only as good as it’s updates.
I’ve been using AVG for years and have been virus free the entire time.
Seems like this free software is as good as anything else.
I’m pretty sure AVG notifies you if it finds something. If AVG never “made a peep”, and independent verfication shows you are virus free, that simply means you’ve been lucky and never got one. It has nothing to do with AVG being effective, it’s just chance. AVG (or any other anti-virus prog) can’t really prevent them from coming into your computer, they can only contain them and clean them away once they arrive. If it never notifies you, it’s not being effective, it simply has nothing to do.
What is strange is that McAfee used to issue frequent warnings about some intercepted virus. It happened fairly often. Now with AVG, never. Sometimes, I wondered if McAfee was issuing these warnings just to impress me with its vigilance. Lord knows the program downloaded slower than molasses.
My guess is that you simply haven’t been hit by any viruses lately. I wonder that with more good, free solutions available now, like AVG, more people have better protection and the viruses simply cannot spread like they used to unless they are brand new and not in the latest defintion files.
Since you said you independently verfied the machine is virus free, assuming the verification was valid there’s only two possibilities:
You simply never got a virus for AVG to clean
AVG is set to clean them or “vault” them without informing you.
Like your immune system, these programs cannot prevent the virus from entering your system, they can only handle it once it’s been detected.
There’s a way to check your “Virus Vault” in AVG. I’m at work, where we use something different, so I cannot tell you how to get there. But it would be interesting to see if anything got sent there.
Also, can anybody check if AVG has the option to clean without alerting the user? Again, I’m at work so I cannot look.
Antivirus is a commodity: all software works equally well. The only issue is the updating, but there’s rarely more than a day’s difference between the first update for a new virus and the most recent.
Since antivirus is a commodity, you buy it like any other commodity: by price.
Sorry to sound ignorant, but I thought one of the big message of the SDMB–and those from software reviewers–is that not all software is alike. Some same Norton is mainly bloatware. Others swear by it. Some lionize McAfee, etc.
So, you’re saying that all antivirus apps are alike and perform the same? (would you say this about XP vs. Linux, etc.?)
Essentially, yes. All antivirus software does roughly an equal job of stopping viruses. See, for instance, ICSA labs certification list. It has eSafe, Avast, Command, AVG, Antivir, Panda, Norton, Trend Micro, McAfee and others all passing its tests. Virus Bulletin has its 100% award for antivirus software that detects 100% of “in the wild” viruses with not false positives. Again, nearly all antivirus software is on the list.
There might be preferences in how they run, or who you deal with, or how they update, but if you’re talking antivirus protection, they are all the same. The main reason why McAfee and Norton keep their lead is because one or the other comes on any new computer and it’s easier to keep it than to install something else.
(There is a bogus element in most magazines testing antivirus, too, most notably is that they ignore freeware solutions).
This is different from other software. Operating systems in particular are quite different; if you have Windows, you can’t run Mac programs, and that might mean you can’t run what you need. It’s the same for most other software: the features do make a difference.
With antivirus, there is a long list of programs that give equal protection. Most of them also have an automatic update provision. So, ultimately, you’re comparing apples to apples to apples to apples, which means you should be basing your decision primarily on price.
While it may be true that most of the AV apps have equal detection capabilities, that’s not the only thing we require of AV software. It has to work well with the rest of the system. Some AV works well on most machines but will completely lock up when exposed to certain other apps. I’ve had particular problems with McAfee and Panda on some machines, and switching to another app gave me equal protection with no side effects.
While all AV might be able to detect viruses equally, they differ in how they treat them. For example, one app (coughMcAfeecough) would delete an entire mail spool if it found a virus in any part of it, often deleting hundreds of other uninfected emails as collateral damage. This makes it completely ineffective as an AV solution regardless of their detection accuracy or price.