Symantec’s slogan should be, “We’ll take innovative, useful software and turn it into unusable bloatware!”
I agree with you on Symantec/Norton though - buggy, intrusive, system-hogging bloatware.
[Unnecessary snark. Removed] I apologize.
No problem - I think it’s merely the case that 90% of Windows PC users aren’t vigilant enough to avoid the obvious risks, and aren’t in a secure environment anyway.
Yes, but a good suite will also protect you from Spyware, which is likely a bigger threat. And I have had Spyware attacks from sites like Snopes (almost certainly one of their advertisers, not Snopes itself, but still).
Oh yeah, I use HiJackThis often for spyware. As far as I can tell, it’s virtually impossible to avoid getting spyware on your machines.
What are you doing? The only thing that I have ever found on my computers that gets flagged as spyware are tracking cookies from web ads.
Besides the obvious tracking cookies, I’ve gotten some search toolbars installed in my browser (not since XP SP2, though), I went to view a video clip from a website (not porn, surprisingly enough) and foolishly trusted it when it told me it needed to install the codec. With HiJackThis, I was able to see what was added/changed. Both times, I was able to uninstall everything.
Plus, having a good sense of what processes run in Windows and what look suspicious helped out a lot when diagnosing these things.
Which makes you smarter than 99% of home computer users. You may not need a virus scanner, but it is a worthwhile necessity for users without your computer skills.
Just an AVG dissenter - I found it to be just as sneaky and bad as the viruses that it was supposed to be searching for. Even after I disabled it and told it to only run when I launched it, I discovered that it was running a “helper” in the Taskmanager - then I caught it running weekly automatic full system scans after I had specifically disabled that behavior!
Symantec’s policy is to leech so many system resources and be so intrusive that it draws your attention away from smaller, less significant viruses.
I’ve seen that (the reappearance of scheduling) happen when AVG underwent a major version upgrade. As far as disabling it - it actually consists of several distinct processes - disabling the resident shield or the email scanner, for example, doesn’t disable the control centre - you’d have to manually disable all the AVG processes in MSConfig to stop it loading at all (or just uninstall it).
I have heard this claim before and it is crap. Oddly enough, the only real to know if you have viruses is to run an anti-virus program. That may sound stupid but most viruses don’t do anything obvious to your own computer like kill your hard drive but they hog system resources, screw with the registry, and maybe even help e-mail kiddy porn to 100,000 people when you are asleep. The resource drain is real but it tends to happen over time so you will just figure that it is your computer getting older.
I recommend Avast these days. It is much better than AVG ever was since they came out with a hugely better version.
Avast! is just as free as AVG. It works fine, except it doesn’t play well with some torrent clients.
The only mal-ware I’ve ever had to fix was a dialer that didn’t rear it’s ugly head until I switched the living-room 'puter over to dsl.
I see about one virus prevention a year from my antivirus. I stay away from obvious sites that look like their there to infect you. The persons that call me up and complain that their system is messed up, have a virus ridden, hacked, and malware ladened system about 50% of the time. It’s not one thing, it’s multiple, to the point of hour after hour new viruses and malware are still showing up. Your biggest problem is you have Norton. By the way I don’t care if you do get a virus, it’s not my information.
Would you mind not emailing me directly, thank you very much. All we need is yet another computer Typhoid Mary.
nah the number keeps going up everytime it tells me to renew. Last time I got my computer reformatted due to a hardware problem it had gotten up over 300000+ by the end of the month that they provided free. Strangely enough, after it expired, I never got any of those 300000+ viruses it had protected me from…
Count me in the “exagerated threat” crowd. I have never installed anti-virus software on my PC. Since I got my first computer in 1998, I have had a grand total of one virus, and that was one I purposefully infected my PC with just to see what it would do (the old Netbus trojan, for those of you keeping track). It was fairly painless to remove. Every 6 months or so I’ll do a scan with Housecall (free web-based antivirus scan) just for the heck of it, and it always comes up clean.
But really, I’m the only PC on my cable connection, my only e-mail is Hotmail, I don’t open attachments unless I am expecting it, and I’m not stupid enough to go to sites like http://noviruseshere.bobsdomain.ru (I made that up).
And if my PC did in the slim chance get a crippling virus, why not just do a low-level format and reinstall the boot drive, scan all storage drives from a safe system, and restore everything? It couldn’t take more than maybe 2 hours. How much risk could there possibly be?
What’s the name of the program making these claims? I ask, because there are rogue anti-malware programs out there that say similar things.
Wow. I’m a little stunned at the people who think the virus threat is ‘exaggerated’. You’ve clearly never seen a completely hosed machine. And while the risks of getting worms and viruses are small it’s still there. And yes, a decent firewall will protect you, but why the hell would you not go the extra step and have the extra protection. You’re not just trusting yourself not to open anything bad, but you’re trusting Microsoft not to screw up something, or legit companies not to release virused software. There have been cases of official shrink wrapped software containing viruses.
The days of the destructive virus, or the annoying worm are gone.
People do this to make money, you could be infected and never know. Your computer could be a zombie spamming people without your knowledge. It could be quietly steal ebay passwords or credit card details.
Of course it’s up to you, but really why wouldn’t you? What’s the downside of having a virus scanner running?
There’s a reason every major company has virus scaning systems in place.