Any recommendations on an anti virus program?

[Donald Aquilano]

If your looking for free.....

1) Avast(the best IMO)
2) AntiVir
3) AVG

 

[draggar]

Just a recommendation - before you do any scanning give your system a good clean out, Clean Cache 3.0 or CCCleaner are great tools to get rid of all that cashe stored in your system - even what's not cleaned out with a standard (built in) cleaner.

This can literally clean out tens to hundreds of thousands of files which can easily stack on an hour or several if it all had to be scanned.

 

[Donald Aquilano]

Go get the free version of malwarebytes, let it update & run. let it remove everything it finds. Never seen it to have a false positive yet. For rootkits, gmer is awesome.

Yes I agree with you on Malware Bytes. Great program. Never heard of GMER but I will try it.

 

[warnerms]

O.K. here is my Smart Ass remark. If you were using a properly designed Operating System, then you would not have to use any sort of Anti-Virus software. The fact that you have to add this software, and probably pay a yearly registration fee to boot, indicates that the underlying operating system is flawed to begin with. How many OS-X (Mac) or Linux users have these sorts of problems?
Microsoft, was so affective at keeping competition out of the Marketplace by breaking numerous anti-trust laws, that no one was the wiser regarding other options. I would say that Desktop versions of Linux are very usable at this point. I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop.

 

[Raider]

O.K. here is my Smart Ass remark. If you were using a properly designed Operating System, then you would not have to use any sort of Anti-Virus software. The fact that you have to add this software, and probably pay a yearly registration fee to boot, indicates that the underlying operating system is flawed to begin with. How many OS-X (Mac) or Linux users have these sorts of problems?
Microsoft, was so affective at keeping competition out of the Marketplace by breaking numerous anti-trust laws, that no one was the wiser regarding other options. I would say that Desktop versions of Linux are very usable at this point. I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop.

You can find fault with any OS and make the same argument.... No operating system is perfect.

 

[DomainsInc]

O.K. here is my Smart Ass remark. If you were using a properly designed Operating System, then you would not have to use any sort of Anti-Virus software. The fact that you have to add this software, and probably pay a yearly registration fee to boot, indicates that the underlying operating system is flawed to begin with. How many OS-X (Mac) or Linux users have these sorts of problems?
Microsoft, was so affective at keeping competition out of the Marketplace by breaking numerous anti-trust laws, that no one was the wiser regarding other options. I would say that Desktop versions of Linux are very usable at this point. I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop.

if mac was the most popular OS you can bet there would a lot of viruses targetted towards it but since its such a small % that use anything but windows it simply makes no sense to spend time targetting others. Its not that mac is a superior OS. linux might be but its not something the average user can run.

 

[Arrogance]

Hijackthis is also a good program to have imo, not an anti virus but great for registry integrity

 

[petrosc]

if mac was the most popular OS you can bet there would a lot of viruses targetted towards it but since its such a small % that use anything but windows it simply makes no sense to spend time targetting others. Its not that mac is a superior OS. linux might be but its not something the average user can run.

spot on

 

[warnerms]

spot on

Actually any Unix type operating system is built from the ground up with security in mind.
That said, it is simply an order of magnitude more difficult to write a virus to attack UNIX derived operating systems, which include of course OS-X( BSD license), Free BSD, Linux distros. With Microsoft products it seems security was an afterthought, and not part and parcel to the original design, hence the problems that plague your average Microsoft operating system User. If you think Linux is still difficult to use, you should take a look at the latest version of Ubuntu. Linux is evolving, and probably at a faster rate than any of the other OSes.