Shortly before getting Mike's note on Avast I took some time to go
through the log files of AVG's last couple months of running. Since it
runs at night I tend to forget about it. If it finds a problem, it
simply moves the suspect file into the "virus vault". You'll see that
happen if you happen to be there when it discovers a problem but
otherwise it just goes quietly into the log. The side effect, of
course, is that while the file hasn't been deleted it's not to be found
where expected.
I was a bit surprised to find about a dozen files in the vault put there
over the last couple of months. Half of them proved to be not viruses
but tracking cookies such as "Spybot" typically finds. But the other
half were files quarantined for supposed viruses and trojan horses which
included two VueScan installation files of different versions and some
Microsoft version restore files from prior OS updates. I had previously
found a couple of items that AVG had quarantined which I thought were
bogus and I thought the same of the newer finds as well.
So I restored all the supposed virus and trojan horse files to their
proper places, uninstalled AVG, installed Avast and let it rip through
both hard drives using its "scan before boot" option. The first finding
is that Avast is actually a bit slower than AVG. AVG can run through my
C drive in 1-1/2 hours. Avast takes 1-3/4 hours. It seems to be
particularly slow scanning PDF files. But Avast found no viruses or
trojan horses to complain about.
It took me a little while to realize that Avast operates differently
from AVG. Avast's somewhat slower performance in scanning the entire
computer seems not to matter at all since it doesn't normally scan the
entire computer unless you tell it to do so manually. It only scans
files as they are loaded. I thought that could be a performance problem
in itself but so far haven't noticed any visible degradation of
application startup performance. I suspect that the scanning speed is
fast enough that the CPUs are able to scan the data coming off the hard
drive as fast as the drive can deliver it. I also looked for a virus
database update schedule but haven't found any such thing. I don't know
when it calls home to refresh the virus database. With AVG you specify
a time of day for that to occur.
Anyhow, all seems well so far and I'm glad to be rid of those pesky
false positives.
Chuck Norcutt
Scott Gomez wrote:
> Supporting some 500+ machines at a school district, we used to use
> McAfee "enterprise" version. It was fine until the 2007 update at which
> point it noticeably bogged down machines, as well as developing some
> peculiarities regarding upgrading (most machines upgraded fine, some
> few, for no reason we were able to track down, required lots of manual
> rip-out and reinstall work). Symantec/Norton had never been seriously
> considered due to its well-known tendency to be darn-near uninstallable.
>
> California's budget mess (and a change in management to yours truly)
> meant that something else had to be found. We could no longer justify
> the expense of that many McAfee licenses, and I personally had reached a
> frustration point regarding the amount of system resources claimed by
> McAfee.
>
> Being as I see it as my duty to reduce expenses to the taxpayers
> wherever possible, I made finding a viable open source AV product one of
> the criteria. That lead us to ClamWin, the windows-ized off-shoot of
> ClamAV, which serves well in the Linux world. It's proved to be a fine
> choice so far, and uses very few resources, running well even on older
> Win2K machines (and yes, we still have those in daily use).
>
> It's worth a look, if you haven't seen it.
>
> ---
> Scott Gomez
>
> On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 09:17 -0800, Mike wrote:
>>> Thanks for the advice but AVG isn't troublesome enough yet to bother
>>> changing. But I'll keep it in mind.
>> AVG was noticeably more sluggish after the last "upgrade" so I dumped it
>> and switched to Avast. Seems to work very well.
>>
>> Mike
>
--
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