Because of AVG's trend, I am thinking of changing to either Avast or AntiVir. Which offers better protection? Or, what else would you recommend?

How difficult is it to uninstall AVG?


HP Pavilion - Pentium® 4CPU
160GB HDD 512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2 Home

I would recommend AntiVir. It has superior detection rates.

How difficult is it to uninstall AVG?

I find Avasts lack of a help document to read before I install a major annoyance and there is absolutley no excuse for it so I will avoid them.

They have documentation on their website, and even a downloadable PDF document. Albeit the PDF document is for the commercial version you'll get the gist of it even if using the free Home Edition.

I get about 30-40 spam emails daily, here at home. Windows Mail (on Vista) is the client and it has a nice spam filter. A couple of days ago, I was sifting through the spam box, before deleting, and saw a nice "Paris Hilton" message - with attachment. OOoo. AntiVir is installed but doesn't have an email scanner, so everything comes in. Panic ? Nah. I don't have much time to analyse nasties but I thought this one might be interesting (hey it's spring time, gimme a break..). So I saved the attachement to the Desktop. AntiVir quiet. Moved the file to VM (XP with Avast! 4.8). Unzipped and ran saver.exe (looking forward to that "clip" of Miss Hilton they promised me). File ran while Avast! watched in silence (it's worse than me !). Nice backdoor infection and VM started spamming almost immediately. Can't find the darn "clip"

So next I go back to the Host (Vista) and decide to run the file through Virus Total. As soon as I unzip the thing, AntiVir gets mad and blocks it (Trojan.Gen or something similar). HEY !... my "clip" ! Oh well... "Ignore" and then VT : only two or three AVs could see it. Nice and fresh.

So if anybody tells you that AntiVir (free) stinks because it doesn't have an email scanner, well... best to have good detections when an infected attachment is run than have 7 shields that sleep on the job

Still looking for my "clip".

Because of AVG's trend, I am thinking of changing to either Avast or AntiVir. Which offers better protection? Or, what else would you recommend?

How difficult is it to uninstall AVG?

I just don't get it. I've never seen PCTools stuff being mentioned on those anti-virus comparing sites. I use PCTools too...

Ok, yes, Avira doesn't have an E-mail Scanner. But, answer me this, what good does an "E-mail Scanner" have if the dectection don't work as good a it's supposed to? Anecdote from another forum:

I don't see the need for an email scanner. Don't open e mails from people you don't know. Especially if it has an attachment. In case you have a blond with big boobs moment and do something stupid like open an attachment from some one you don't know the resident shield will protect you just like it does if you open any infected file. The email scanner is redundant IMO and I disabled it in AVG.

But look at this though: Clicky!

Being included on that list is pretty good though isn't it?

Many upon many will get awarded with "Vendors certified for Anti-Virus detection." PC Tools AntiVirus from my experience will catch some stuff others may miss, and found the file on my system that I had thought was suspicious for a very long time, but it had never did anything malicious.

I followed my own advice and just switched over permanently to PC Tools Free AntiVirus just last night because Avast for some reason was having trouble "initializing it's engine" to begin a scan and was taking about 10 minutes to begin a scan. After an uninstall and clean install it didn't fix it, so the switch was rather necessary and I surely didn't have the patience for it to take 10 minutes to "initialize it's engine."

What did you think Of Avira Antvir? I remember you trued it recently but I dont remember what you thought about it?

I just don't get it. I've never seen PCTools stuff being mentioned on those anti-virus comparing sites. I use PCTools too...