Ask Slashdot: Actual Best-in-Show For Free Anti Virus? 515
First time accepted submitter paperclipman writes "I'm on the college student budget and want to make sure that my recent investment in an Acer laptop will last me a good long while. I like to think of myself as a reasonably competent CPU user so I'm no adventurous link-clicker, but I do download some music as a recent SoundCloud devotee. My Kaspersky antivirus will be expiring shortly and I don't particularly care to renew with that steep of a fee — any advice from fellow thrifts?"
Re:You want ad-blocking, not AV (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't want a virus? Do the following:
1. Remove all adobe products. Flash is ok with flashblock.
2. Keep firefox or chrome up to date, don't use IE.
3. Remove java plugin.
4. Install adblock and noscript.
5. Have a router, block everything inbound.
The number of things that can infect you with that setup is about 0.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the same thing IMO. A great amount of malware requires that the user does something. So "download our .exe and ignore the security prompts!" is still a very large section of things, and has nothing to do with a secure OS or not. Programs running as a user has as many rights as a user themselves. That's what most virus software is for: detecting that you're trying to run something that's "bad" but it's not exploiting security holes to do so. It's just running with "full trust" just like any other program on your machine, and behaving badly.
Re:Simple (Score:3, Interesting)
Well then you obviously don't have any mid to large size archives on your disk. MSE chokes and uses tons of CPU ( a known issue, supposedly "has gotten better" , not that you would notice a whole lot... ) on rar / or zip files and sometimes cab files when it scans random files in the background and lands on the archive. I've had it choke off a dual core 3.2Ghz processor so bad I thought I was back on a 486DX again with the program load / wait times.
That said it SEEMS to do a decent job, either that or I'm not going to the shady side of the 'net. Malwarebytes doesn't find much other than the occasional cookie it doesn't like the looks of on either of my machines that run Windows.
I was using ClamAV for quite a while, and still would if it had a decent RT scanner.
College student? Check your benefits (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted it was ten years ago, but when I went to UNCC, there was a small selection of software provided by the school under a shared license for free to students. This included, in my case, norton corporate, which was not intrusive and did an admirable job. Might wanna check around and see if you have similar options available. While the best free AV might be MSE for Windows, you might be able to get a paid AV for free.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You want ad-blocking, not AV (Score:3, Interesting)