I’m with you, Simplicio. I’ve been in IT for almost the last 20 years. I probably haven’t used AV for the last 5 at least and I’ve never been happier. The first sign of anything weird and I triage by running malewarebytes, clearing temp files and old programs, and running a registry cleaner. My comp purrs like a kitten.
I’ve never had anything but issues with AV. Either it’s scanning every file that your computer accesses, thereby slowing it down considerably, or just causing general problems around the rest of your software.
Oh, and using Firefox with adblocker helps immeasurably.
If you’re not hitting potentially infectious sites (i.e. random porn or warez) and are careful about what you install, viruses are few and very far in between.
Oh, and I have 3 teenage girls and still no problems.
Pretty amusing reversal. AVG jumped the shark several years ago IMO, and Norton got quite good around the same time. I’ve heard good things about Avira too (resource footprint vs effectiveness), but I haven’t used it personally. I have no problems recommending Norton to people these days.
Yes I was. However, after that I could only run my computer in safe mode and I got nothing BUT spyware after awhile.
If I had been using an Adblocker as well (which is what someone told me was the problem) none of it would’ve happened.
If your point is, “well, it didn’t protect you, so why bother?” that’s like telling someone, “well, birth control fails, so why bother?” I’ve got an anti-virus program that’s anti-malware as well as an adblocker. So far, it stops those fuckers cold.
Do you ever log into a site that stores your credit cards? Like you credit card’s website? Or Amazon? Or Paypal?
It doesn’t take much for something on your system to notice that you’ve gone to Chase.com or USBank.com and log your username and password and send it over to some guy in India or Nigeria.
Anyways WRT the OP, my parent’s computer has that AVG safesearch crap too, but it’s not my computer (though I did set up AVG on it) so I don’t much worry about it. It may have been on mine at one point, but if it was I just changed the home page back to Google. In fact, I just updated AVG a few days ago and had no problems at all with it. It’s nice because it used to send up a HUGE intrusive window once or twice a day, now it’s just a little tiny thing in the corner.
I don’t want to be one of THOSE people, but AVG was a resource hog and I could never get XP fast again, even with an agressive uninstall and switching off nearly everything. Kinda screwed up my XP partition when I installed Linux and haven’t missed it.
Note to THOSE people: Even Ubuntu Linux is still an amateurish, poorly-documented POS that can be a pain in the ass to do anything with that wasn’t installed with it, so don’t get cocky.
Oh, if the instructions coming from management could be turned off like that! But yes I proposed that but the manager came with the security rules the school must have. Still, I will propose and show how an anti-virus in a virtual machine is not needed.
Here is hopping that the department of education web site in Arizona that requires you to use Internet Explorer to use their site will not do so for the common core tests. So far the change to Ubuntu/Linnux has been effective for the students but in the office we are forced to use Windows. (There are reports and instructions to make IE work in Linnux, will see…)
Actually, knowing already how students make a mess of their Windows computers having a system that does not allow them to mess with their browsers or them having a lot of trouble figuring out how to mess and install programs is one reason the students will get it.
Well, Airman’s computer shit the bed. The HP support site says it’s a corrupted BIOS, but he followed the instructions to restore it and it didn’t work. Anyone got any suggestions? And could it have been due to the AVG thing?
And you suggest which distro? ALL Linux distros I’ve looked at are amateurish and harken back to the 70s, especially their mainframe-ish documentation that assumes you already know what you are doing. It took me an hour to figure out how to open a terminal in this shit to get a fucking command line.
As a friend once said, “After your eighth operating system learning a new one stops being fun.”
But back to the OP. Anti-virus software has caused me more delays and fucked up systems than any virus I ever caught. Taking an additional eight minutes at startup using AVG or Avira was nuts.
By restore it, did he install a new BIOS ? Or even an older version ? It ought to go back to factory defaults.
I recently put in a new battery, and was worried the BIOs settings which are quite specific for the memory settings and ACPI would be gone, but the BIOS back-up facility brought it all back OK ( if one makes back-ups, but even if not it just means entering it by hand ).
Maybe his CMOS battery needs replacing…
I doubt if AVG or any malware affected his BIOS, although it seems dubiously possible, and had it done so, inserting a new BIOS would cure it. ( I can’t speak for the new EFI system. )
I am not being patronising when I would suggest you give up on Linux if you don’t get on with it and go for Windows or Apple: I would always rather discourage people from choosing Linux if it frustrates them, using it does neither them nor Linux any good.
I’m using Opensuse**13.1, with the latest KDE**: but I do know that whilst it works well when installed, and better than Windows, it takes long experience or enthusiasm to make it the best that could be ( such as installing NVidia or AMD’s own graphics drivers ). Linux looks nothing like '70s or even '90s computing: it just looks like any standard desktop. Plus they like all the OS makers introduced stuff before the others had it, like 64-bit versions.
Documentation is poor, as is looking up Windows Error Messages; Linux forums are off-putting; and both Opensuse and KDE introduce stupid stuff every now and again — but I haven’t had a non-hardware related crash for 4 years.
I rarely use the command line, but as my desktop is strictly old school, WIMP to the max, if I go to the Menu — the second thing I do on installation is to switch to the Classic Menu ( much like Windows 2000 ) — it takes me 3 seconds to select from any of 4 terminals, including a root terminal. I have 20 virtual desktops, frequently used stuff in the panels, and no icons.
And not using AV means it starts up in around 60 - 90 seconds.
What happened was this: my mouse stopped working (it’s a wireless USB mouse), so I restarted the computer. The screen went blank and the computer didn’t come up. The Caps Lock button LED was blinking twice, which, according to HP, meant that the BIOS was corrupted.
I tried their reset several times with no success. Then, rather than shutting it off via the power button, I pulled the battery, just to see what would happen. And here we are.
Like I said, magic. Weird.
The reason Robin asked whether the whole fracas yesterday might have screwed it up is because one of my machinations may have corrupted the BIOS. I am hardly the go-to guy for computers, so I couldn’t discount it. I can build one, I can manipulate one, I can fix one if the fix is simple, but even though I have a decent understanding of the inner workings the finer details are voodoo to me.
What? And miss all the fun and opportunities to complain? And since when have I cared about how much good I was doing an OS? Other than the real OS-9, but there I knew most of the serious users and developers.
On top, but underneath seems like it is still a bunch of purposely arcane commands, like UNIX. Or OS-9. And what’s with this love of line editors? I sometimes think I need to drag my old ADM3A terminal out of the crawspace so I can fit in with the Linux world. :mad:
I have never said anything nice about MS docs. But back to our original chronicling of the decline of Dave and Robyn’s marriage.
But yes I proposed that but the manager came with the security rules the school must have. Still, I will propose and show how an anti-virus in a virtual machine is not needed.
