Malware warning!

[TheJamsh]

hahaha. Raven you pretty much nailed it there...

[Vid]

S'kinda sad that those are the extents users have to go through. Sorta makes you wonder about the human race when there are people out there who just make this junk up and spread it around for the sole purpose of raping peoples machines.
What kind of *Ammo*ed up individual do you have to be? No friends, fat, a virgin, no social skills or contact, lives with their parents but stays in their room/basement at all times and because their life is so god damn hard with their running water, over-availability of food as shown by their appearance, parents and a roof over their head, they resort to that.

Death isn't something I wish upon people, but when I really think about people like that I come close.

I'm half of those, but I don't create malware! honest.

[Raven]

I'm half of those, but I don't create malware! honest.

Well, the only one for me is that I live with my parents, but I'm 17, I'm allowed to
As long as you don't create malware, you're fine by me and I shall let you live xD

[Wraith]

A friend of mine tried but the infections came back on him and fubared his machine. Whats funny he didnt learn the first time so it happened again so he quit trying.

[Raven]

Your friend is a douche.

[Wraith]

No kidding. 

I believe he was one of the people who helped with beta testing.

[AHadley]

I'm check on two, but I don't write malware, unless you mean batchscripts made years ago to shutdown a computer at a specific time and to open the calculator a few hundred times. Simple and yet amazingly funny

[Vid]

The simple batch scripts are the most evil...     classmate put a deltree c: batch on another classmate's computer at college.   This was during the 15min break(2hour class).  He came back, double clicked the icon without even checking what it was... and... well he was reinstalling his OS the rest of the class.  Granted we reinstalled the OS about 20 times during that class, so it wasn't a huge loss.

[AHadley]

ouch.

[Avatar]

AVG free is good, and what I put on any system I set up for people who don't know what an AV program is, or why they need one, etc..  "and it's ID10T, as in "eye-dee-ten-tee". 

My current favorite is McAfee, though, and I can no longer live without their "Site Advisor".  Pops up little circles next to sites in either IE or Firefox that clue you in to the safety of clicking on one.   Works with all search engines, gives detailed info on specific sites if you ask, and best of all is totally invisible otherwise.

Generally speaking so far McAfee puts zero load on my poor old, underpowered Athlon.  I had Symantec Security Suite and it was a pig, dragging my system to it's knees even when I was using it.  Just updating itself automatically slowed me to a crawl, where McAfee is even polite enough to put itself on pause when it detects that I'm gaming.

Very cool.

-Av-

[Vid]

I like site advisor, but isn't it available for free without the full mcaffee package?

The real issue is, people are finding more and more holes that they can sneak stuff into a computer through without having to actually have you download and run something.  People have become accustomed to everything being automated and don't like clicking yes/no security dialogs and other annoying security features.

We can't wait until the virus/spyware is on our system(from a webpage, email, direct attack, or P2P file sharing).  We have to stop it before it gets to us.  Well fortified routers stop most direct attacks, while siteadvisor, noscript, adblock, windows updates, and spywareguard/blaster handle most of IE/Firefox vulnerabilities.  Email scanners come on most antivirus packages, HTML emails can be disabled in the email program usually, and you can disable the preview pane and delete emails from people you don't know.

In years past, Mcafee was a little bloated and ate resources like symantec.  I'd be happy to hear that its not as memory hogging now.

[Raven]

McAfee actually destroyed one of my old computers. It went absolutely insane and took over everything, locking access to files and forcing the computer into its lovely quarantine mode where you couldn't do anything but boot into safe mode. Coupled with the fact that they want me to pay for that hoote, they can go and screw themselves.
Though it is good to hear they seem  to have fixed a few issues like its hunger for resources...
AVG seems ok with the resources so I'm fine with it, and yeah symantec is a resource-hogging piece of rubbish.

Though I haven't had to use these programs in ages, I boot into windows only to play games, and as far as I remember I actually uninstalled AVG for some reason (I think I was removing the simlock on my phone and it thought the program was malicious and kept putting it into quarantine...) so its completely unprotected. All it does is play bz2 and EvE online though, so, whatever. If it gets a virus, I start again, no biggie.

Noscript is veeeery useful, and firefox runs on any windows or linux OS machine I have. Once google sort out their issues with Chrome, that'll take over though as to me it shows huge potential.
As for my macs, Safari 3 may be a bit unsecure, apparently, but its almost as fast as chrome and I like some of the newer features (that have blatantly been stolen from chrome, mind) so I flick between Safari and Firefox, depending on which one is faster at the time. I would never but Safari on windows though, it just has the added bonus of integrating into OS X a bit better than Firefox does. And it seems to have less memory leaks now than Firefox too, which is always nice.

[squirrelof09]

I'm a fan of putting AVG on a customer's computer. However, I am not a fan of AVG for any of my personal computers/family computers...

AVG seems ok with the resources so I'm fine with it, and yeah symantec is a resource-hogging piece of rubbish.

AVG and it's resistant shield hogs resources in version 8.0 and up. It kills a system with only 512 Ram...

[Vid]

I thought that was just my imagination. My Dad's PC  (Celeron D with 2x 512mb 266mhz ram) had been getting slow lately.  Thought it was just the PC showing its age on the components, so I disabled the AVG resident shield and linkscanner.  It sped up some after that, but I still thought it was the components, not a change in AVG.  All he does is do flash games/web surfing/email.... so its been alright for now.

[Zero Angel]

McAfee actually destroyed one of my old computers. It went absolutely insane and took over everything, locking access to files and forcing the computer into its lovely quarantine mode where you couldn't do anything but boot into safe mode. Coupled with the fact that they want me to pay for that hoote, they can go and screw themselves.
Though it is good to hear they seem  to have fixed a few issues like its hunger for resources...
AVG seems ok with the resources so I'm fine with it, and yeah symantec is a resource-hogging piece of rubbish.

Though I haven't had to use these programs in ages, I boot into windows only to play games, and as far as I remember I actually uninstalled AVG for some reason (I think I was removing the simlock on my phone and it thought the program was malicious and kept putting it into quarantine...) so its completely unprotected. All it does is play bz2 and EvE online though, so, whatever. If it gets a virus, I start again, no biggie.

Noscript is veeeery useful, and firefox runs on any windows or linux OS machine I have. Once google sort out their issues with Chrome, that'll take over though as to me it shows huge potential.
As for my macs, Safari 3 may be a bit unsecure, apparently, but its almost as fast as chrome and I like some of the newer features (that have blatantly been stolen from chrome, mind) so I flick between Safari and Firefox, depending on which one is faster at the time. I would never but Safari on windows though, it just has the added bonus of integrating into OS X a bit better than Firefox does. And it seems to have less memory leaks now than Firefox too, which is always nice.

Argh! McAfee! A terrible antivirus! TBH i've had more problems with various versions of norton, but mcaffee just bloated and slows down computers quite noticably.

I thought that was just my imagination. My Dad's PC  (Celeron D with 2x 512mb 266mhz ram) had been getting slow lately.  Thought it was just the PC showing its age on the components, so I disabled the AVG resident shield and linkscanner.  It sped up some after that, but I still thought it was the components, not a change in AVG.  All he does is do flash games/web surfing/email.... so its been alright for now.

if AVG is working for you then keep it but if it gives you problems, you should try out Avast antivirus -- its free and has good proactive detection.

I personally prefer ESET NOD32 Antivirus, because its fast and lightweight, but it's not free.