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Leo Laporte’s Antivirus recommendations with links and extra suggestions


Leo’s formatted comments about antivirus:

If you’re a Windows user you need an Anti-Virus. I do not recommend the current top sellers: Norton Anti-virus or McAfee. They’re bloated and less effective than others. Check any anti-virus before you buy by visiting the independent Virus Bulletin. Any anti-virus you choose should also be certified by the ICSA Labs (all the big commercial products are).

• If you can’t afford, or don’t want to buy, an anti-virus program I recommend the Free Version of AVG from Grisoft. It’s fairly accurate but to reduce bloat you might want to turn off the background tasks.
•
• The best commercial anti-virus is NOD32 from Eset. It’s relatively inexpensive and has a 100% effective rating from the Virus Bulletin. [Disclaimer: ESET is a sponsor of the radio show, but I use it myself and would sincerely recommend it even if they weren’t.]

Symantec’s Anti-Virus Research Center is a good source of virus information. The site also lists hoaxes and offers many free virus removal tools. Most anti-virus companies maintain similar sites. Unfortunately, there’s no standard for virus names, so you may have to look around to find the right page.

If you are having problems installing an AV product it may be that your system is infected. Use one of these free online anti-virus scans to check for infection:

• F-Secure
 • Trend Micro’s Housecall
 • Panda’s ActiveScan

Currently these online scanners require Internet Explorer, but a cross-platform version of Housecall is reportedly under development.


ClamWin also offers free AntiVirus solutions for Windows.

Another option is AntiVir which is recommended by my son Gavin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Windows Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Leo Laporte’s Antivirus recommendations with links and extra suggestions”

  1. Power of Free comes to Cloud Antivirus « My Digital Identity Says:
    September 2nd, 2009 at 5:53 am

    [...] have written about the free business model and anti-malware before but now the two are coming together in a cloud [...]

  2. bandsxbands Says:
    February 2nd, 2010 at 2:30 pm

    My friend and I were recently talking about how modern society has evolved to become so integrated with technology. Reading this post makes me think back to that discussion we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.

    I don’t mean this in a bad way, of course! Ethical concerns aside… I just hope that as memory gets less expensive, the possibility of uploading our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It’s a fantasy that I dream about every once in a while.

    (Posted on Nintendo DS running R4i SDHC DS BB)

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