What is the Best antivirus for windows XP?

What is the Best antivirus for windows XP?
And firewall? i hate the SP2 firewall.

I second that.

I have given up Norton AV for Avast.
1) Its free
2) It uses very little CPU resources.
3) When it turn it off it goes off.
4) It won't quit working once a year unless I pay up.

I know 1 and 4 are pretty much the same, but every non-expert I know who uses Norton ends up infected once a year becuase somehow they don't notice the messages saying they need to renew their subscription or else.

Downside:
1) No integrated spyware protection (need adaware and spybot for that).
2)Now that I put Avast4Home on everyones computer I no longer make money repair computers due to virus infections.

I swithced from Norton to Avast in protest when Symantec added product activation to Norton AV 2004. Since then I have been using it to keep my computer and a dozen others safe with zero problems.

Avast isn't entirely free, its just free for home/non-comercial use.

Anyway there are many great programs that are open source, free or have free versions that contain all the functionality home users are likely to need. Many are simply the best program to use despite being free.

Firefox & Mozilla
Adaware
Spybot
ZoneAlarm
BSPlayer
AC3 Filter
Deamon Tools
CDex
DVD Decrypter
AutoGK
iTunes
Prime95
wxChecksums
Bittorrent
Emule

I am sure others can thing of even more examples.

I've been using AVG 7 Free for a while now without problems [crosses fingers] ... what's your guys opinion of Avast vs AVG Free?

Thanks ...



<b> ...more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol - W.C. Fields </b>

avast seems like a small file of 350kb should it be that small, i downloaded nortons 2005 security pack 1 years free subscription, is this any good i dont trust free firewalls but if avast is as good as panda then i will try it.

i used to have panda plat subscrption ran out.

I haven't used panda before but I have avast on all my comps and all my clients comps and it has done a damned good job sofar. I'll bet the pro version you pay for is even better. I'm tempted to buy some licences for it.

I think the avast installer is like 8mb or so unless it has changed very recently. Make sure you are getting the right thing

Avast also has plugins for email (including outlook w/exchange), all major instant messengers, all major P2P software, and more.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

yes please post the links for avast direct downloads.

By the way Panda platinum securty suite is sh1t, the day the subscription stopped i got Nortons anitvirus 2005 i updated and it found 4 viruses and 1 trojen horse, Panda is not what its cracked upto be.

I would like to use norton firewall with antivirus disabled as it really hogs up resources trust me, and i want to use avast for virus will this be a good combination or will they clash?

Avast.com and it is a little over 8 megs to answer your earlier question.

You Dont Want To Be The Last to Know Anything.

Didn't ask (or care) about file size ... not an issue with me ... but I was curious what Avast offered that AVG didn't ... hasn't been answered yet ... seems most ppl on good security sites recommend Nod over AVG ... and Avast comes up short .... but this is not from someone who get infected ... so, essentially, how the he<b></b>ll would I know ...

I'm just looking for the best free ride ... and AVG is painless ... and with no problems in half a year ... well ...




<b> ...more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol - W.C. Fields </b>

Avast works so well for me and everyone I know that I have never even considered trying anything else. Its free, it doesn't slow down my PC and I don't get viruses. What more can you want.

I would like to add that everyone installing any antivirus program should be using an antivirus test files.

All the antivirus companies got together and added the fake virus definition to their products.

That way you can email it to yourself and see if your email protection is working. Put it in a zip of a zip or a zip and make sure your scanner is going deep enough inside archives, show you mother what it looks like when a virus is found etc.

Anyway here is the virus test string. Cut & past it into a text file and it should be detected as "EICAR Test-NOT virus!!"

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Thank you guys for the links and help.

Let me update my previous post ... for accuracy. When I pasted the "virus test string" into the body of a Yahoo email ... nothing happened - no warning. But when I pasted it into a wordpad text file and attached it to an email - it was picked up.

Initially, roadrunner deleted it at their server level before it got to me ... so I couldn't really test AVG.

So I just scanned the "file" with AVG 7 and it reported it as a virus ... didn't say "EICAR Test-NOT virus!!" ... just virus found ... and asked me what to do ...



<b> ...more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol - W.C. Fields </b>

I always email myself the test virus to make sure my email is properly protected.

I imagine with some AV programs you will have to send it as an attachment, as plain ASCII is a very unlikely vector for a virus infection.

However AV programs usually scan every file regardless of the file type, so sending it via an attachment should always trigger a warning.

It would be funny if the server this forum is running on has a virus scan and my post gets deleted

I pasted the string into a txt file and tried to save it to my documents...as soon as I hit the save button AVAST went off like a fire alarm...I love these warnings..heh heh..sirens blaring, messages flashing, and the text says.."Don't Panic" LOL

....WW (5.0)

Wanted to let you know that after AVG failed to catch the test virus file in the "scan selected areas" mode ... I uninstalled it and installed Avast 4.5 ... the AV caught the test file everytime ... so for now, I'm using Avast ... thanks for proving your point.



<b> ...more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol - W.C. Fields </b>

You should be able to just right click on the directory and choose "Scan (foldername)".
You can also select directories to scan from inside avast too. When on the simple user interface you can just check the box next to "Folders" and it will prompt you to select directories to scan.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

Panda-monium


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It was a serious reply, tainted with humor...
Can you guess what the vote was for?

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smiling...

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Only thing i dont like about avast is that i cannot send emails bigger then 1 meg with outlook express.
I get the message that i timed out or some crap like that. I uninstalled avast and was then able to send any size email. Unless there are certain settings that i dont know about, im going back to Symantec Corporate AV.

Confuscious say: He who go to bed with itchy ass, wake up with stinkyfinger

Viruses made by haxors are caught by all major AV sw...
It is just when one of the AV corp engineers want to ramp up biz in their arena, they write the AV sigs, then release the virus, then beat thier drum loudest proclaiming how much better theirs is since theirs detected the virus first!!!
Just keep whatever U use up to date...

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And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
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Thats not normal, Avast wasn't installed right.

I also had a few problems with getting a previous version of Avast and getting the mail settings right.

It took me 10 minutes reading the manual the first time to get it working properly, which is unacceptable.

To be fair I had a similar problem with Norton AV 2000.

Norton is definately easier to install and less likely to require any manual intervention. Its user interface is also more intuitive.

Installing in on someone computer I am repairing is going to be either expensive or illegal

The latest versions also don't work on slower PC's, and are huge resource hogs.

That being said all the following version of Avast installed properly the first time, and runs great on modern PCs as well as slow PC's running 9x.