|
Re: Best anti-spyware
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:18:30 -0500, "Mr. Freeze"
>I have a brand new computer that came with Windows Vista Home Basic. I also
>purchased Windows Live One Care "Which I am told from a tech. that comes
>with Windows Defender built in".
Vista has Defender built in; dunno if One Care enhances it. One Care
brings the av to the party, tho.
>I keep scanning and scanning and scanning and nothing comes up
>"Nothing at all, no Qaurantine's, no problems reported
Could be good news. But I always wonder if it's worth using the same
tool that was supposed to block things on entry, to look and see if
these things have got into the same system.
I suspect you have the same misgivings and want to install and use
additional non-resident tools for on-denmand scanning?
>I haven't installed any of my other spyware protection programs because
>I wanted to give Live One Care a chance. I have Spycatcher/F-secure/Norton
>and many others but I am kinda concerned untill they are announced as
>being 100% comptible to run them because I don't want to run anything
>that is going to misread a program that might be important.
You know the rules; never install more than one resident tool type at
a time - i.e. use only one resident av, one resident firewall, 0 or 1
resident antispyware, etc. So what you want to do is add tools that
are either on-denmad only, or can be constrained to work as on-demand
tools only. I would flee screaming from Norton anything (much as I
loved Peter Norton in the DOS days, those days are gone, and Peter
left the playing field ages ago anyway).
>I think this either means Vista and Live One care are preventing the spyware
>and addware from being installed and just not telling me that it is blocking
>it or my computer is infested with the stuff.
>Could it be that a lot of the addware stuff just isn't Vista compatible yet?
:-)
I use AdAware, Spybot scanners and Spyware Blaster as "vaccinator" in
Vista32. I could use A Squared and AVG Antispyware (ex-Ewido) as
well; these two may be resident in the sense that they update
themselves, but require the paid versions to be active as resident
scanners (which you don't want right now).
Of these, AVG may be the best. A Squared's good, too, though a bit
less stable perhaps, and more prone to false-positives. Both tend to
find things that the first two missed.
On pure on-demand av, I'd suggest Trend SysClean (download afresh when
you need to use it, both engine and sigs) and Bit Defender, if they
still offer their free on-demand-only scanner. Like AVG AS, that will
update itself from a SysTray icon, but not scan on access.
If you're OK with CLI scanners, then you can build a tier of on-demand
CLI scanners that are properly serialized and parameterized via a
batch file. You'd then integrate that into the UI in various ways
(rt-click action for directories and drives, SendTo target for
arbitrary files, overnight Task to scan subtree of incoming material,
etc.) to more easily wield as an on-demand "Fist of Death [TM]"
Suitable Win32 (as opposed to DOS) CLI av can be found, and may
include those from McAfee, Sophos, F-Prot, Kaspersky, etc. The update
process for these will be severely manual ;-)
>--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
Saws are too hard to use.
Be easier to use!
>--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
|