A firm believer in low user rights, my male 16 year old's machine has never been compromised and belive me he's not averse to trying to find porn sites. Do we need AV software for non admin users?

Anyway, running as standard user is way way much safer that with admin priviledge, but is not perfect.

I feel your pain I hate AV big time too.  Never been attacked by viruses, but must acknowledge that every once in a while, I feel compelled to run a passive scan in my machine.  After all, we all are exposed to be cheated by a rogue installer, because, you check the MD5 and signature of every installer you run, don't you?

That said, I just switched it over to Avira AntiVir. I've heard alot of good things about ESET NOD32 as well.

In fact AVG, historicaly (don't use it much these days) has been really good on the performance front.

joechung said:

I wonder how you are so certain that you have never been infected.  People believing that their systems will not get infected if they are "careful" are prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

So far it's worked out quite well. I've also avoided STD's through the same method.

joechung said:

I wonder how you are so certain that you have never been infected.  People believing that their systems will not get infected if they are "careful" are prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Well my other machines have one of either Onecare, McAfee, Panda or Norton installed, set up fully up to date before being allowed on the internet. I've only ever found tracking cookies which don't bother me that much. Similar spec machines but only the Norton system has been slowed too badly. Maybe it's just I ensure their all patched.

My work job requires me to fully test MS and other patches before inflicting them on my 10,000 machines, so maybe I'm unusual in having all the boxes as protected as possible. I deal with infected machines from time to time, funny how it's always the people who "need admin rights to do my job". The biggest downside is they're usually directors who make the policy for everyone else but shout the loudest that we're not protecting them. And we claim the Americans don't get irony.

This win7 system - a service "avgsrv??" was causing the processor to hit 100% for hours, maybe I've got some wierd data on a back up drive it doesn't like.

Thanks CKurt will try that, after all this is only test not production system at home and I'd really don't fancy paying for a trial version of AV for it at this stage.

joechung said:

I wonder how you are so certain that you have never been infected.  People believing that their systems will not get infected if they are "careful" are prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Yeah it's not worth the performance degredation and its no substitute for good practices.  If your machine is kept patched and you don't go around running arbitrary binaries this software is totally redundant.

TheGnu said:

joechung said:

*snip*

Well my other machines have one of either Onecare, McAfee, Panda or Norton installed, set up fully up to date before being allowed on the internet. I've only ever found tracking cookies which don't bother me that much. Similar spec machines but only the Norton system has been slowed too badly. Maybe it's just I ensure their all patched.

My work job requires me to fully test MS and other patches before inflicting them on my 10,000 machines, so maybe I'm unusual in having all the boxes as protected as possible. I deal with infected machines from time to time, funny how it's always the people who "need admin rights to do my job". The biggest downside is they're usually directors who make the policy for everyone else but shout the loudest that we're not protecting them. And we claim the Americans don't get irony.

This win7 system - a service "avgsrv??" was causing the processor to hit 100% for hours, maybe I've got some wierd data on a back up drive it doesn't like.

Thanks CKurt will try that, after all this is only test not production system at home and I'd really don't fancy paying for a trial version of AV for it at this stage.

This win7 system - a service "avgsrv??" was causing the processor to hit 100% for hours, maybe I've got some wierd data on a back up drive it doesn't like.

You've not got some kind of scheduled scan set have you....? That kind of thing's caught me out enough times before.

GoddersUK said:

TheGnu said:

*snip*

This win7 system - a service "avgsrv??" was causing the processor to hit 100% for hours, maybe I've got some wierd data on a back up drive it doesn't like.

You've not got some kind of scheduled scan set have you....? That kind of thing's caught me out enough times before.

Probably was, but it's uninstalled now so I can't tell, even so it should have run at a lower priority - I can accept 100% CPU usage after all why have we got them, but it should back away when I need to do something. It was the trashing of my ethernet card I was most surprised by.