Heartland

so, anyone know any good (& free) anti-virus software?

i use norton myself and seems to do the trick nicely, but i'm currently fixing a friend's pc - its riddled with spyware and virii

i've installed lavasoft's "ad aware" and thats removed a lot of stuff

i've installed zone alarm so that should stop a lot of rubbish getting through

i've re-applied XP service pack 1a (dont trust sp2 yet after it shafted my pc!)

i've stopped the "messenger" service so that should stop any tedious popups that zone alarm misses

and now i need some decent, free anti virus software - something that offers free virus def updates would be preferable, but i know thats asking a lot.

i'd go onto edonkey and grab a copy of norton av 2004 but that kind of defeats the point - who knows what nastynesses it would contain

i'd rather be able to install something that was legit, free and easy to maintain.

the pc's owners aren't that technical, so something that was numpty-tastic would be good...

any ideas?

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ is pretty good - totally free and nothing really to download (there's a small download - but takes not time at all - even on dialup)

OS X?
awright, give us a kickin'

James Blast wrote:OS X?
awright, give us a kickin'

i'll leave that to hal tomorrow

anti-vir is good and free - and you can set it to automatic update (mine updates every night).

http://www.free-av.com/

AVG - www.grisoft.com

Also you'll need a firewall - http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm

Also chuck on Spyware Blaster to stop spyware, diallers etc installing:

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

Put Mozilla Firefox on as their Internet browser and delete all links to IE6:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Also chuck on Spybot Search and Destroy which should find anything that Adaware misses:

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

d00mw0lf wrote:http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ is pretty good - totally free and nothing really to download (there's a small download - but takes not time at all - even on dialup)

interesting idea! download a "thin client" and then let the central server do the scanning and updating of the virus definitions

however, i have their pc here and i dont want to have to install my adsl modem or tamper with their dialup settings or anything so i need something that i can download on my pc, burn to cd and then install on theirs, and let sort out the updates at a later date...

@ lazarus corporation & CellThree:

ta

Quiff Boy wrote:

d00mw0lf wrote:http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ is pretty good - totally free and nothing really to download (there's a small download - but takes not time at all - even on dialup)

interesting idea! download a "thin client" and then let the central server do the scanning and updating of the virus definitions

thin clients are great in theory - but when the server is down or busy, your PC is completely unprotected from virii.

bloody hell.

installed Spyware Blaster & removed a dozen nasies

installed Spybot Search and Destroy and removed a dozen or so more nasties

downloaded the "stinger" virus removeal tool from network associates and removed about 30 nasties

installed AVG 6 (free edition) and removed abouy 20 nasties

now i seem to be left with "DOWNLOADER.SMALL.9.AI" which avg 6 doesnt handle (clicky)

will carry on looking for stuff tomorrow...

marvellous.

ran all the above tests on my pc too and it was a ok

how do people let their computers get in such a mess?

At least AVG is finding it!

Try turning off system restore then rebooting then turning sytem restore back on again, then do another scan.

Have a look here:

http://www.grisoft.com/faq/us_faqtext.php?id=224&sid=25

You may have to use the start up floppies to get rid of it properly.

I just removed a virus the other day (only my 2nd virus in 5 years) and I can recommend the online scan at the housecall site.

Just a week earlier I installed the Japanese version of win98 on another hard drive so I can dual boot in order to be able to use a Japanese filesharing prog. I downloaded a file, unzipped it, clicked on the folder... and it was an exe with a folder icon. B@stards.
It's all removed now, but one casualty was that Outlook Express took 2 minutes to open. A reinstall of Outlook didn't help and as nobody was able to come up with a solution I got rid of it and I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird now.

OS X is a bloody virus. I can't believe there is a company in Hawaii doing a x86 port of it.

I've started using Clamwin. It's an open source project which means they won't retract their current service and offer premium crap and leave you high and dry.

It uses the ClamAV virus database which seems to be very good. We use it to scan all 4 gigs of mail that goes through our mail servers everyday and have very, very few complaints.

Quiff Boy wrote:bloody hell.




how do people let their computers get in such a mess?

It takes moments of practise, Quiff. (or have teenage or a bit older than that, sons!)

Oh and add to that mix a 'Gaz'

did I mention I spent Saturday afternoon getting scumware and virii of my freind's laptop? what fun that was. The bastard virus had put all the AV websites in hosts file and made them point to 127.0.0.1 so I couldn't update the AV program on the PC.

I had to boot off knoppix and edit the host file before I could do anything useful.