Rootkit?

[jonthedit]

The registration has worked for me everytime i've installed it.
Are there any free alternative anti virus programs that you prefer instead?
I was looking at the eset nod32 beta 7 because its free but I don't want to use it because after its out of beta it will probably go paid.

Stick with Avast... I'm just a little disappointed with them right now. The bug is on Windows 7 and Windows XP ATM, Windows 8 is unaffected.

Unless they pull a full Norton 180, then they should be staying on the better side of AVs.

Stay away from McAfee, Norton, MF, and AVG [AVG is a RAM raper]

 

[Fishaman P]

I use Avast because of the low false-positive rate; from what I can see, there's some confusion as to whether this is a virus or not.

In this case, I would trust Avast. Even with my heuristic sensitivity set to the max, Avast has never had a problem with my AMD graphics drivers, even beta drivers. I find it hard to believe heuristics (especially on default settings) would flag a legitimate, popular driver.

 

[sandytf]

I use Avira. The free version includes a couple nag elements, but those are easy to disable.

 

[3bbb7]

I use Avast because of the low false-positive rate; from what I can see, there's some confusion as to whether this is a virus or not.

In this case, I would trust Avast. Even with my heuristic sensitivity set to the max, Avast has never had a problem with my AMD graphics drivers, even beta drivers. I find it hard to believe heuristics (especially on default settings) would flag a legitimate, popular driver.

I'm confused too because I've used Avast for years now and have been installing/updating drivers on this same machine since the beginning of the year without any issue

 

[Originality]

I could fill a page of why you should or shouldn't use various AV products, but I won't.

I'll just say that whatever AV suite you use, make sure you only use one with active protection. I've come across too many PCs recently that are slow simply because someone thought it would be safer to have 2 or 3 active AV suites at the same time. Not only were they all fighting to scan each file first, they were also scanning each other the entire time. Such things thrash a HDD and CPU for no good reason.

 

[Rydian]

I got to spend some time with A/V insiders not too long ago (I'm not going to name names because they're clients) and they let me in on some of the industry dirt.

1. The fact is, not one of the A/V products on the market will catch every virus. It makes sense to periodically scan with different vendors.
2. The whole emphasis on signatures is mostly marketing. Signatures will always lag behind what's in the wild. Signatures are only useful when heuristics fail.
3. Heuristics are incredibly difficult to "get right" because false positives not an option, but legitimate software publishers use the same techniques as virus authors to prevent reversing their binaries.
4. The number one reason A/V software fails is because users disable it or ignore the warning messages. This problem affects every A/V product on the market and renders them all equally useless.
5. Retrospective heuristic comparisons (like the ones conducted by AV-Comparatives.org) are inherently biased against the largest vendors.
Why? It's simple. Virus authors will test their latest builds against the most common virus scanners before releasing them to make sure that they can infect the largest number of users. So no matter how good the heuristics are in McAfee or Symantec, they are always going to be viruses that they can't catch because the viruses are specifically written and tested to evade them.