Deleted my AV

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Why don't you move the kid/wife to linux? All the female stuff (powerpoints full of puppies and flowers etc.) are linux compatible and safe to view through it. Same goes for general websites.

[Dragon]

I have a 17 year old that proves on a regular basis that no amount of AV will stop a determined effort to do stoopid.  But I have to disagree that the AV programs are worse than the viruses - Vundo for example is just about impossible to clear without a format.

So is Norton BTW

[Vulcan]

"Good" being the operative word.  They also false trigger more.  No telling how many customers we lose a day because of this.  If programs were any good at all (not saying all of them are bad) at handling "day zero" viruses, there would not be a million, or so, sleeper computers being used on the net for various delivery systems.  The bulk of those computers are OEM units running either Norton or Mcafee.

Mcafee still relies heavily on a database.  Norton may, but I am not going to bother testing it.

As far as being rusty about AV programs.  You are correct.  I do not stay on top of them as I have no need for them.  Never had a virus on my computer and I never will.  I still consider Mcafee and Norton both to be worse than the viruses they are supposed to stop.  I do take a peek at them once in a while to see how it impacts the game.  They are getting worse, by the way.

Herein lies another problem, the corporate versions are heads and shoulders above the retail versions.

The bulk of those zombies running OEM mcafee or norton are probably expired licenses . This is another problem, stupid users, the AV vendors respond to dumb users by dumbing down their AV, no matter what they do the users come up with stupider things to do.

For the AV vendors its a war on two fronts, on one side you have virus writers, on the other dumb users . Look at the supposedly bullet proof OS X, now they have anti-malware code in snow leopard, and there's a bot net out there. Nothing is idiot proof.

[Skuzzy]

Vulcan, you are preaching to the choir.  No argument from me.

Why don't you move the kid/wife to linux? All the female stuff (powerpoints full of puppies and flowers etc.) are linux compatible and safe to view through it. Same goes for general websites.

I let her drive Linux for a bit and she complained to no end about how she could not sync her phone to her apps, and a few other tidbits which Linux is still lacking.

She said she would rather put up with the viruses.

[OOZ662]

The last virus I got was when the Blaster worm first hit the market. The last spyware was a little while after that.

I'm tellin' ya; properly set up router firewall, separate Windows partition, FireFox, NoScript, and AdBlockPlus. Plus, an online-email system like GMail. Nothing gets through unless I want it to.

Because of one of the threads around here (this one?) I just recently started using COMODO for the heck of it. There is a noticeable drop in game performance, but I'll tweak with it. It didn't pick up anything other than false positives during two scans on my four-year-old data, nor did ESET's online scanner or Kasperky(sp?) a while back.

Plus, I'm a teenager. ... *cough*

[OOZ662]

I just recently started using COMODO for the heck of it.

Wow, talk about great timing. I didn't even get around to tweaking it yet and it decided to give me this awesome 15+ minute 100% CPU usage burn-in test, for free! Was so thorough that I had to nuke it from orbit (safe mode). So much for that.