Running my PC without an antivirus?

[bruceb]

Install a copy of Avast Free AntiVirus .. it is fairly light and works well.

 

[vahnx]

If you know what not to click and don't just go installing random software from ad's you'll be fine without A/V. Windows 8 comes with built in A/V that's turned on by default but I personally turn it off.

 

[radhak]

I don't have the background on why Berryracer is run down so much in this thread, but the information he provided seems straight from a presumably independent tester. Would be good to hear any objection to the report itself instead of shooting the messenger...

I for one am inclined to believe it, particularly because it's closely supported by another tester : http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/avc_sum_201212_en.pdf. The top five are swapped around a bit, but MSE appears in the bottom two in both reports! I was wondering if I should start using it, but I'll stay away now.

Currently I don't have any paid AV, but have waffled between AVG, Avira and Avast. I think Avast is better reviewed among them, so I might standardize with it.

Near future, maybe I'll think of putting some money down and getting one of the top 5 in the list, whichever uses least system resources. I've heard bad things about Bitdefender.

 

[wand3r3r]

I'm not sure about the berryracer dissing in here.

I recently saw that MS SE was way down the list in an antivirus test, it used to be decent for freeware (or so i thought).

Avast or one of the free antiviruses should be ok.

I would not recommend going without anything.

Most web viruses tend to use JavaScript or Java and possibly PDF, Word, etc. so no-script (firefox add on) is helpful, but nothing is foolproof once you connect to the abyss.

 

[Berryracer]

I don't have the background on why Berryracer is run down so much in this thread, but the information he provided seems straight from a presumably independent tester. Would be good to hear any objection to the report itself instead of shooting the messenger...

I for one am inclined to believe it, particularly because it's closely supported by another tester : http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/avc_sum_201212_en.pdf. The top five are swapped around a bit, but MSE appears in the bottom two in both reports! I was wondering if I should start using it, but I'll stay away now.

Currently I don't have any paid AV, but have waffled between AVG, Avira and Avast. I think Avast is better reviewed among them, so I might standardize with it.

Near future, maybe I'll think of putting some money down and getting one of the top 5 in the list, whichever uses least system resources. I've heard bad things about Bitdefender.

thank u for posting an honest opinion and straight facts rather than come here like others and flame me with no backup

and what you said is absoultely true. MSE sucks in every test out there and the worst thing is that the majority use it blindly not knowing what may be lurking under their PC

avast and AVG are good free choices.

I have a 5 PC / 3 year license for Bitdefender AV but I dont use it any more. it is so buggy and slows down my internet

I use NOD32 now for a long time. no false positives and very light

 

[nemesismk2]

I have a 5 PC / 3 year license for Bitdefender AV but I dont use it any more. it is so buggy and slows down my internet

After looking at loads of reviews which say Bitdefender is one of the best AV it wasn't very good for me and i found that Bitdefender 2013 was a resource hog, buggy and slow. What i mean by slow it's slow to do virus scans, slow to boot up your pc and slow to close down your pc. This was with Windows 7 and Windows XP. I think i will try Avast and AVG next.

 

[Ketchup]

I don't have the background on why Berryracer is run down so much in this thread, but the information he provided seems straight from a presumably independent tester. Would be good to hear any objection to the report itself instead of shooting the messenger...

I'm not sure about the berryracer dissing in here.

You didn't see it in this thread because I imagine we are all tired of bringing it up. His posting history is here if you guys are interested.

Bottom line is: if you practice safe browsing habits, MSE is fine. If you spend your time downloading all the freeware you can find, buy the highest rated thing you can.

 

[taq8ojh]

I use NOD32 now for a long time. no false positives and very light

Oh yes. ESET makes one of the best (imo) antivirus of all times. The current Smart Security version is a bit slower than the original NOD32 couple years ago, but it still does the job perfectly.

 

[Berryracer]

Oh yes. ESET makes one of the best (imo) antivirus of all times. The current Smart Security version is a bit slower than the original NOD32 couple years ago, but it still does the job perfectly.

The good thing about Eset, is that if you have a license for Eset Smart Security, you can use that same license to activate NOD32 straight away

I have a 3 year / 3 PC license for Eset Smart Security but I only install NOD32

Reason being:

1) Eset Security's firewall is pooh according to reviews especially when you leave the settings at default, which ALLOW most outbound and inbound connections, the only way around that is to set it to interactive mode where you tell it what to allow and what not, but then again, that's a big headache as u will have to configure every single connection on your PC which is a hassle

2) I don't want any 3rd party Firewall slowing down my internet even 1 bit, the Windows firewall is good enough especially u have a Firewall in the Router

3) NOD32 is lighter

4) Been using NOD32 since 7 years and never got a virus or false positive

the only AVs that never gave me a false positive are NOD32 and Kaspersky AV

Bitdefender and Norton AV gave me so many false positives it wasn't even funneh

PS: Another GREAT thing about Eset, is that if you own a license, you can activate that license on the same PC as many times as u like it will never tell u your key is blacklisted. with Kaspersky AV, if I reinstall my OS like 3 or 4 times, the 4th time I try to activate the license is already blacklisted and I have to contact support, send them purchase proofs, and wait for 2 to 3 days until they reset my activation limit. Since i format a lot testing out new drivers, I don't want no heacaches so Eset's product shine in the activation department

 

[taq8ojh]

Well, you can disable most ESET's components, so you don't need to care about stuff you don't want. I wouldn't use the firewall either, starting with Win7 the builtin firewall is just about perfect.

 

[inf1nity]

well the thing is that since i have just 1 GB of RAM in my PC so i need an AV that isn't very heavy.. so i am not sure about ESET NOD

 

[taq8ojh]

In that case, I would say you need to upgrade the most of all things.

 

[Berryracer]

well the thing is that since i have just 1 GB of RAM in my PC so i need an AV that isn't very heavy.. so i am not sure about ESET NOD

I would upgrade that RAM to at least 2 or 4 GB RAM is so cheap nowadays

NOD32 is the lightest AV you can find and if you want a good free option then u can get Panda Cloud AV it's super light

 

[Ketchup]

I would upgrade that RAM to at least 2 or 4 GB RAM is so cheap nowadays...

If we're are talking about DDR3 it is. Anything older? Not so much.

 

[pyonir]

well the thing is that since i have just 1 GB of RAM in my PC so i need an AV that isn't very heavy.. so i am not sure about ESET NOD

I only have 1.25GB of RAM and MSE works fine for me. I've had no issues for a couple years now. Right now MSE is using about 59MB of ram and stays around there most of the time.

 

[Hugh Jass]

I don't bring the advice from the top of my head. I gave j00 the proof from a respected virus testing lab. The ch0!c3 is now yours if you want to listen to meh or not. Enjoy your virus full life with MSE

I have run MSE exclusively for AV since it was first released and have not even come close to having a "virus full life" -- in fact I can't remember the last time I had a virus on my PC.

And you wonder why folks on here don't take you seriously.

 

[lxskllr]

I have run MSE exclusively for AV since it was first released and have not even come close to having a "virus full life" -- in fact I can't remember the last time I had a virus on my PC.

And you wonder why folks on here don't take you seriously.

I think the problem is most of us don't get viruses anyway, regardless of what we run, even if it's nothing at all. Some people are skilled at catching viruses, and I wouldn't be comfortable giving them MSE to run. That was a large reason for me switching my mother to Ubuntu. Avira started getting more intrusive with their popups, and they confused her. I didn't trust MSE to deal with stuff she may click on, and the fwd fwd fwds from her friends. As a side benefit, Ubuntu's faster, and easier for me to admin, so both of us are happy.

 

[pyonir]

I think the problem is most of us don't get viruses anyway, regardless of what we run, even if it's nothing at all. Some people are skilled at catching viruses, and I wouldn't be comfortable giving them MSE to run. That was a large reason for me switching my mother to Ubuntu. Avira started getting more intrusive with their popups, and they confused her. I didn't trust MSE to deal with stuff she may click on, and the fwd fwd fwds from her friends. As a side benefit, Ubuntu's faster, and easier for me to admin, so both of us are happy.

My parents were the same way...but they were using IE. I switched them to Firefox and taught them how to use NoScript and AdblockPlus. Added in MSE and they haven't had any issues since.

 

[Hugh Jass]

I think the problem is most of us don't get viruses anyway, regardless of what we run, even if it's nothing at all. Some people are skilled at catching viruses, and I wouldn't be comfortable giving them MSE to run. That was a large reason for me switching my mother to Ubuntu. Avira started getting more intrusive with their popups, and they confused her. I didn't trust MSE to deal with stuff she may click on, and the fwd fwd fwds from her friends. As a side benefit, Ubuntu's faster, and easier for me to admin, so both of us are happy.

That's all well and good and I totally understand.

But for that guy to tell me or anyone else to enjoy a "virus full life" because I or others may run an AV he doesn't like is just ignorant and arrogant as he doesn't know me, anyone else on here or anyone's browsing habits.

It's fine for him to post his opinions and whatnot but to essentially get up on his high horse every time MSE comes up and act as if his opinion is gospel word on the subject because he cherry picks a few links that happen to side with him (or I guess he with them) is just rude and disrespectful to me and the others he rants at.

He did the same with Firefox users when he decided he didn't like Firefox anymore and he's done it with other software or OS related topics and it gets old.

And before it's mentioned again, I know I can put him on ignore but why should I hamper my browsing experience all because he wants to be a know-it-all childish dick when he feels like it?

 

[Soundmanred]

I have run MSE exclusively for AV since it was first released and have not even come close to having a "virus full life" -- in fact I can't remember the last time I had a virus on my PC.

And you wonder why folks on here don't take you seriously.

Same here. I HAVE had MSSE popup a few times saying it caught something and isn't allowing it.

 

[taq8ojh]

I have run MSE exclusively for AV since it was first released and have not even come close to having a "virus full life" -- in fact I can't remember the last time I had a virus on my PC.

Uh, but that doesn't mean the program is good at all. It ONLY means you were lucky.

Why are you all jumping at the guy in so retarded fashion? He might have posted stupid stuff in past (I don't know, never saw him before), but in this case he is absolutely right.

 

[inf1nity]

actually i am gonna upgrade to 2 GB soon. Its DDR2 so its not really cheap.

 

[mikeymikec]

I don't have the background on why Berryracer is run down so much in this thread, but the information he provided seems straight from a presumably independent tester. Would be good to hear any objection to the report itself instead of shooting the messenger...

Because he jumps on every single antivirus thread saying "nooo! MSE is the devil!", and if anyone tries to debate the topic with him he immediately shuts up.

I responded regarding av-comparatives.org's and av-test.org's tests here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35154822&postcount=6

One worrying thing these days is the lack of research into AV effectiveness. The fewer people doing it, the more likely it is that they've all been bought off by one vendor or another.

When I've read anti-virus effectiveness research in previous years (probably before 2010), the pattern was always the same - a researcher would pick x number of threats (let's say 1000) and try out say 10 AV packages and test them with those threats. A researcher would conclude that one product was much better than another because it detected a larger percentage of threats. Then another researcher would come along, pick 1000 different threats, and could/would come up with completely the opposite results and conclusion. The reason is fairly obvious - most anti-virus systems work based on blacklisting of known malware (e.g. a bit of identified-as-dodgy binary code). That means that the code has to be out in the wild first then found (one way or another), then each vendor can start work on identifying the threat, analysing its payload, work on disinfection, test its product, then release a product update that includes detection signatures for said threat. In the meantime the malware is potentially running rampant on users' systems. This is an unlikely scenario for "95% AV effectiveness" to occur.

Part of my work involves removing malware from customers' computers. I haven't seen anything to suggest that one AV product is much more effective than others (ie. I've seen most/all AV products miss a bit of malware on more than one occasion).

---

Regarding the OP's question - I don't see the point in risking it. All it needs, even if you are careful in your browsing habits, is for a site that you frequent to sell advertising space to someone who then uses it to dish out malware through the banners (ie. your browser just needs to view the banner for your machine to be potentially infected).

 

[nemesismk2]

You didn't see it in this thread because I imagine we are all tired of bringing it up. His posting history is here if you guys are interested.

Bottom line is: if you practice safe browsing habits, MSE is fine. If you spend your time downloading all the freeware you can find, buy the highest rated thing you can.

this is very good advice because i think MSE is fine too.

 

[John Connor]

If you want to run naked on the net, then at the very least I would suggest using Firefox with the add-on Noscript. Right there that can prevent a lot of possible infections depending on your surfing habits. If you download some kind of installer like from Cnet then that will be your own problem.

I have one computer using Bitdefender and the others using Avira. I use Comodo Firewall. If you use Comodo firewall and Avira then install Avira first otherwise it will complain about Comodo.