Antiviruses

I recently installed AVG onto my personal computer. This is the first time I have ever installed a virus scanner on any of my computers.

I don't like virus scanners. I personally don't think I need one, but I installed one for two reasons:

1. The computer lab at my school is constantly infected with viruses.
2. I repair other people's computers at my home.

The computer lab has been having issues with viruses since the start of the semester. The lab uses McAfee and keeps it up to date. The first virus attack was not detectable by McAfee. The school was able to stop it two weeks later by adding the new microsoft antivirus. Last week they announced more profiles being infected with another virus.

I repair computers on the side. My customers are mostly friends of friends. Majority of the time their issues are malware related. Pretty much every infected computer I see has an antivirus program installed, and many of them have active subscriptions (I don't know if the subscriptions were activated after the infection though.) Also, almost every infected computer has limewire installed.
Lately I have noticed that some problems are due to the virus scanner.
Some computers had over a years worth of windows updates fail due to the virus scanner. One computer was completely unusable even though it satisfied the minimum requirements.

So I installed AVG free because even though I don't feel like I need a virus scanner, the computers I work on do. AVG seems to be the least bloated out of the many choices, but today I noticed a big performance hit when transferring images from a sd card. AVG (and possibly other virus scanners) will scan jpeg files before transferring them. The estimated time to transfer 1g of images was 6 hours. After adding an exception to jpg files the transfer completed almost instantly. I have read other cases online when network transfer rates go from 5kb/s to 5Mb/s after disabling the virus scanner. Another issue is false positives. I have had a vnc client deleted from my flash drive at school due to this.

I have yet to work on any infected computers running Vista, and from what I understand, the UAC model works pretty good as long as it stays enabled.

I frequently hear others brag about their virus scanner being good because they haven't been infected yet. Or they talk about all of the things that their virus scanner blocked (which usually just turns out to be tracking cookies.)

Does anyone have any recommendations on which virus scanners to use or avoid?

Has anyone had an infected Vista (or win7) machine?
If so:

Do you use a virus scanner?

Did you disable UAC?

How did you get infected?

a virus scanner that doesn't see a virus is no good of course

I use Comodo firewall/anti-virus for my vista 32 & 64 machines , I've had no issues with it for over a year now, I do get a few false positives (not viruses) but rarely and its my choice as to what to do with all reports

I like the fact that the firewall and anti-virus are designed to work with each other
If my memory serves me correct I did get rid of some malware/adware when switching from AVG to Comodo

...but I am careful what I download and were i get it from (Limewire is full of garbage my wife uses it on the other CPU in the house)

panda seems to be an good one....but i dont use them cuz i don't do things to get bugs, don't allow step kids to use puter cuz they always got bugs on it in the past. AND yes limewire is rotton! step son when he was in house a few yrs back was constantly reload'n the OS because of bugs from limewire...(he lost/miss placed 2 of my windows disks the TURD!!!!)

I use mcafee, spybot, and adware--never had a problem.

I was running Norton for years, but I was experiencing the biggest beef people had with it. Was too resource hungry and you could visually see it tax your system with all it's bloat. So I threw that part out of System Works and installed CA internet security suite (was free with my net account with Roadrunner) It ran faster and did everything well. But when I moved, the subscription ran out recently and I couldnt renew it for cheap, so I read that Symantec revamped Norton so it wasnt bloated and taxing on the system and to "please give us another try" So, it was cheaper than CA and I went with their best offering (Norton 360) instead of the System Works as I had and they still offer. Well, It was even faster than CA. Definitely streamlined. They removed a lot of the fluff graphical aspects that it had, but it also isnt as feature rich as it once was either. I thought it would of had Ghost included as System Works had in it, but it doesnt. Paid more for what? Evidently they removed ghost from their bundles and now they offer a backup service online. You get a free 2GB of space to upload only Pre-Selected file types. Not full system backup, just personal date. What a waste of effort. I mean, your backup software with windows is better and works just fine...But it keeps warning me on boot that my backup isnt setup. Well I dont need it. Got my WD My Book upstairs in the fire/water proof save with both of our systems backed up on it so I dont need thier stupid backup service.
But, there is very little action needed on my part with Norton these days. Most of your system maintenance happens in the background and during system idle time, from defrags to registry cleaning.
In general, I'm pleased with it, though I like a little more control, I guess you gotta give up something with lighter weight.

I have not heard anything about vista clients infected as of yet. And if so, you usually only have yourself to blame. The UAC was a pain, but it was there for a reason. And it works. Just people werent used to something so restrictive. So it got a bad wrap. But people need to start getting into better habits, and Vista was the first OS outside of the Server roll to let people secure their systems as a Server does for such things. Win 7 is supposed to be less "in your face" about it, but the practice should remain the same. It's a nasty jungle outside of your router, you need to know how to prevent that bad stuff from coming in.

Evidently they removed ghost from their bundles and now they offer a backup service online. You get a free 2GB of space to upload only Pre-Selected file types. Not full system backup, just personal date.

Spideroak offers 2g of free backup storage. Their system seems really nice and secure. They offer a 100g storage for 10/mo. I also have a dropbox and ubuntuone account, both with 2g of free storage.
2g is enough for documents and important archives. I am up to 20g in pictures. I mirror my pictures between different computers, and I am working on a backup program that stores a jpeg2000 copy for last resort.

I have used partimage in the past for making images. It isn't an automatic system though, you have to manually perform the backups, but I like having the control.

I'm testing the Microsoft Security Essentials (free) and I like the fact that I can turn off active scanning if I need the performance (gaming/work/files/etc...) or turn it on when I'm on the web (facebook/email/forums/etc..)

I'm running Vista at the moment - soon installing Win 7. That's for my primary/gaming machine - I run different OS's and tools on the other machines depending on their function (print server, network, f/w, family and such)

I've used Kaspersky for a little over a year now without any issues. I never download anything and I don't surf the internet a whole lot. I would say that I have pretty low chances for infection. Boingo has AVG on her computer without any problems either. I don't know how effective they both are. Neither of us, except for one virus found on Boingo's computer, has ever had an issue with viruses. AVG found the virus on her computer and fixed it. I've never, to my knowledge, have had any type of computer infection. So, who knows, it is either working just fine and I never get anything or they are slipping past my antivirus and I don't know about it.

Spike wrote:

I'm testing the Microsoft Security Essentials (free) and I like the fact that I can turn off active scanning if I need the performance (gaming/work/files/etc...) or turn it on when I'm on the web (facebook/email/forums/etc..)

Security Essentials has been released now: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/
It is much better with resources. I installed it on a couple of computers for people that are limited on memory and just need something until they can buy a new computer.

I do like that you can turn it off rather quickly. The interface is designed like it should be...simple. I think some of the other companies design their interface to be complicated just so consumers feel that they got their moneys worth.

Another thing I have come across is http://www.virustotal.com/ It will let you upload a file, and it will scan it with a bunch of virus scanners. This is not an effective way to find a virus on a machine, but if you find a suspicious file, it can be handy.

I'm with Demon as far as the Adware and spybot go and I currently use AVG free which has worked well for me in the past.

I think the biggest thing is to not put yourself into situations that will increase your chance of getting your computer infected. Only go to trusted sites, don't download anything, stay off of sites like Facebook and don't open attachments in your e-mail unless you're SURE that it is from someone you trust.

Boingo and I now have Win7 and haven't had any problems, so far. We are still running Kaspersky Internet Security.

Chameleon wrote:

I think the biggest thing is to not put yourself into situations that will increase your chance of getting your computer infected. Only go to trusted sites, don't download anything, stay off of sites like Facebook and don't open attachments in your e-mail unless you're SURE that it is from someone you trust.

Boingo and I now have Win7 and haven't had any problems, so far. We are still running Kaspersky Internet Security.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a trusted site anymore. Any site that has flash advertisements can not be trusted. This includes microsoft websites.
http://cyberinsecure.com/yahoo-banner-ads-infecting-visitors-with-malware/
http://windowssecrets.com/2008/04/24/03-Keep-malvertisements-from-infecting-your-PC
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3140&tag=trunk;content

The viruses that are spreading these days are created by professionals, not the average script-kiddie.

AFAIK, no security suite protects against clipboard hijacking. What some flash advertisements can do is replace any object in your clipboard with a malicious url.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1733
So two things can happen:
If you copy and past a url to your address bar, it will be replaced with the malcious url.
Or if you are documenting something online and you want to post the source as a link for everyone to be able to view, it can be replaced with the malcious url (I saw this on a couple of major news sites where the click to read more link was a link to one of the malicious antivirus sites.)

That is true. You can disable flash and java in your webbrowser. I know someone can put these problems on any site, but when I say a 'trusted' site, do mean something by that. For example, watching a flash video on an adult site is probably not going to be as safe as say a .gov or .edu site. Granted, nothing is 100% secure, but your chances of getting something from the adult site will be much higher then the other two.