Windows 7 question plus decent free virus scanner

afasoas said:
Independent tests: http://www.av-comparatives.org

Running machines without updates and relying on soho routers for security is the way of fools.

AV software is all pants to a degree. To do its jobs it has to run as a privileged process and break many of the rules set for other programs. If an attacker can exploit an AV product, they can exploit the machine.
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I'm always suspicious of these so-called testing sites that declare themselves "Independent" in big letters.
The fact is, nobody can tell how Independent they are, and may well be in someone's pocket to a greater or lesser degree.
For me, the best recommendation of any software is user reports, although of course, none of those will be truly unbiased.
 
Well everyone has slightly different requirements, therefore I wouldn't say that user reports aren't unbiased they are merely inline with their own requirements.

For example many on here commented on it previously (in another thread) that they don't care about e-mail scanning as when it is committed to disk it will do a virus check etc. In my experience that is not fully true of attachments within email messages. And I prefer them to be labelled correctly, and redirected to a specific folder of infected items. In other words, warn before accessed. But I appreciate that may not be important to others. Therefore we focus on what is available and no size fits all.
 
Have recently changed from Avast to Bitdefender, no change in broadband speed, no change in start-up speed but big change in not seeing Avast popups!
 
Mikesphotaes said:
Have recently changed from Avast to Bitdefender, no change in broadband speed, no change in start-up speed but big change in not seeing Avast popups!
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Agreed!

The intrusive pop-ups are one reason I won't be renewing my Avast subscription when it runs out in a couple of weeks.
A have used Bitdefender in the past, which made start-up really slow on my machine.
The best AV prog I can recall using is Eset NOD32, although I see the latest version has a different name.
The renewal price on NOD32 seemed expensive, and Bitdefender appeared to be highly recommended at the time, so I switched.
I think I'm going back to Eset this time, and they do have a 30 day try before you buy evaluation.
 
I have used eset in the past but it was too hard to get some of my PCs to talk to each other.

Very pleased with Bitdefender so far.
 
Ignoring the usual poor advice..

Popups on avast? Don't get any of that with silent/gaming mode enabled.

Never seen it slow any of my 150mb VM down either.

Have ms changed tack of not actually recommending their own av now?
 
neil_g said:
"..........

Popups on avast? Don't get any of that with silent/gaming mode enabled.
"."..............?
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Didn't know about that, Neil.

Does it still autoscan and update itself if left in gaming mode though?
 
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