Electronic Circuits and Projects Forum

The very best I have found to be commonsense.exe which when coupled with other software works quite well. Seriously, my opinion is the software that works best for the end user and their Internet Surfing Habits as well as their Email Volume and how they treat that volume. Personally I use the MS Security Suite at home on all my systems as well as my wife's system. This works well for us and our situation. When I was more active with this sort of stuff and reading up more on it every month every AV software review listed something else over the month before. It just got old after awhile and for the most part was BS.

Just My Take
Ron

Originally Posted by paetoni

which antivirus is the best for pc...? I'm using Norton 2012 right now.

I would strongly recommend Norton - I use Norton 360, it's been absolutely excellent and doesn't seem to cause any loss of speed.

For a free alternative, MicroSoft Security Esentials is a good option.

I once had Avira, but now I don't have any antivirus.

I connect through OpenDNS and have the additional plugin "MyWOT": This signals shady websites with a security alert that prevents you from going in there.

I installed ZoneAlarm as a firewall, and have MalwareBytes.

I share more documentation and PDFs than executables.

I read my mail through Mozilla Thunderbird, and set it to read mails in plain-text. This means no "HTML" stuff, etc. It makes phishing and that kind of things obvious.

I have several filters: Mails from Facebook go to a certain folder, etc. Plus I have several e-mail adresses. Some forward to a "dump" where there's a lot of stuff, and some more "specialized".

I don't have a DVD-Drive (Actually, I have it, but I don't use it).. And I don't plug flash drives, things get sent to me, or a link gets sent to me, and it's mostly PDF or text.

I don't have a DVD-Drive (Actually, I have it, but I don't use it).. And I don't plug flash drives, things get sent to me, or a link gets sent to me, and it's mostly PDF or text.

That last item brings up something of interest that runs with my suggestion of "commonsense.exe". I receive and need to read frequent security bulletins. I have told this story in the forums before. About a year ago They (DoD and DoE) took CD disk and made a fancy label indicating the disk contained sensitive secure and classified information. The disk in reality were rigged to "phone home" if placed in any system with Internet access. The disk were then scattered about in certain areas made to look as if they were lost. Something like 90% of the found disk were actually inserted into secure systems. The same was done with thumb drives. Go figure how many people would pick a disk up off the street and shove it into a machine purely out of curiosity without even thinking. People really are that stupid. Go figure.

Ron

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

I would strongly recommend Norton

Unfortunately, I haven't had as good of luck with Norton. It has allowed viruses in on two separate occasions now. In the first instance, I had to reformat my HDD and re-install everything to be rid of the bug. In the second instance, a trojan went completely undetected, despite my daily updated virus signatures and weekly full-system scans. It was found during a scan with Avast after I removed the HDD due to a non-virus related hardware issue (the motherboard was damaged by an ESD event to a USB cable). I'm not sure I'm going to continue to trust Norton.

Originally Posted by jbeng

It was found during a scan with Avast after I removed the HDD due to a non-virus related hardware issue (the motherboard was damaged by an ESD event to a USB cable). I'm not sure I'm going to continue to trust Norton.

You're rather assuming it was really a virus, and not just a false alarm from Avast - I'm also with gabeNC, ESD from USB sounds extremely unlikely.

Originally Posted by gabeNC

... but to pin it on software imho would be a stretch.

I'm not pinning the failure of the system on software. Trust me, it was the 1/4" lightning bolt from my finger to the end of the USB cable as I reached for my calculator, which was lying next to the cable on the tabletop. My PC was fine until that event, then the problems started.

At first, I would press the power button and the system power would come on for about 3-5 seconds, then turn off. Sometimes it would come back on by itself after a few seconds, then shut off again. I would repeat this 3 - 5 times (oftentimes cycling the main power by using the power switch on the back of the PC) and then it would come on and stay on. One time it took 8 tries to get the PC to stay on. A few times, during what should have been the BIOS splash screen, it was scrambled, unreadable garbage. Not just gibberish, but rather what appeared to be a video signal with no sync. The system would lock up at that point, requiring another boot attempt. When the system would finally boot, it would seem to act fairly normal, with the exception that sometimes a "click" was heard from within the PC and the HDD would spin down and then spin back up. At this point, the system would sometimes hang, other times not.

On the last time I was able to boot the system, Norton indicated my virus signatures were out of date by 365,000+ days and I was unable connect to the server at Symantec to download new virus signatures. It was at that time I turned the system off for the final time, removed the HDD, had it scanned for viruses (by an IT guy here at work) and checked for damaged files and data loss. Avast found what it reported was a trojan during the scan. The file was removed and the drive re-scanned, with no indication of the trojan remaining. It's entirely possible that this instance was a false positive, but the earlier instance certainly wasn't. That is, unless a false positive displays a dark green screen with black text that says "YOU ARE INFECTED" at boot up and requires an HDD re-format and OS re-install to remove the problem.

I have since bought a new PC with an Asus P8H61-M motherboard with an Intel CPU, 4GB ram, a 500GB HDD and Win 7 Pro 64-bit.

@paetoni -- Sorry for seemingly hijacking your thread, but I got the feeling that Nigel and gabeNC were interested in the details of my story.

Originally Posted by paetoni

which antivirus is the best for pc...? I'm using Norton 2012 right now.

The antivirus industry is mostly just marketing nowadays. Microsoft Security Essentials (free if you have a genuine copy of Windows) and the Windows Firewall is a perfectly sufficient combination.

If you are going to pay money for antivirus the only thing worth comparing is the heuristic engine, even then some of the free ones are among the best available.