co-exist with most other Windows AV programs (which is rather unusual). However, the scanner is far too slow at this time to really make it suitable to use alone; I understand that they are Working On This, and it's part of why it's still not reached 1.0 yet. It helps to recall that it was a) based on a scanner designed for Linux, and b) primarily meant as a mail-worm filter.
You can download it here.
Beyond that, the free versions of AVG, AVAST, or Avira all have their pluses and minuses; I use AVG on one machine and AVAST on another. To be honest, I've had much less trouble with any of them (evn given the endless loop of 'upgrade to the Pro version' reminders from Avira and, somewhat less annoyingly, AVAST) than I have from Norton or McAfee - both of which have serious flaws, and are so widely used that most viruses have their number anyway, bypassing or even disabling them.
Don't forget to get at least one anti-spyware program as well, since those are actually a much bigger problem than viruses per se these days. None of the freeware virus programs particularly handle spyware, and the once again, the major commercial packages which claim to (except perhaps Kaspersky and ezArmor) are worse than useless, primarily because the bypasses are so well known. In my experience, a good combo is Ad-Aware Personal plus either Spybot S&D or ASG Antispyware (the companion program to AVG, though the free version is partially crippleware). I used to recommend Spyware Blaster and Spyware Guard, but they don't seem to be getting updated very often lately. I used to use Bazooka as well, but it never seemed to do anything. Don't even bother with Windows Defender (unless you have Vista, in which case you haven't much choice).
You would do well to get a registry cleaner such as CCleaner and/or RegScrubXP as well, though it's not strictly necessary; that can help performance a little, especially if run after cleaning up some sort of malware, but registry optimization only does so much, really.
Whatever you choose, you have to use it; this means making sure that the automatic updates and scans actually run, and periodically (at least once a month) do a manual update on all of them, drop into safe mode, and run the scans there - a lot of bypasses spyware and viruses use are started through startup items, and hence don't run in safe mode automatically, making it much easier to find and remove the malware. Do a registry cleanup, then schedule a disk check and restart, then drop into safe mode again when that's done and defragment the drive(s) (it will run much faster in safe mode, as there are fewer competing processes running). you might want to set at least part of this running overnight, or while you're out, as it can take a while.
I see that GRIsoft has an anti-rootkit program now, too... I'll have to look into it. |
