Good Anti-Virus Software?

[hikaricloud]

I'll be honest with you, i've made this mistake quite a few times, recommending to some of my clients to use nothing at all, only for me to have to clean up their mess later. So with that I will concede your argument and forthcoming adjudicate my advice on the basis of the experience of my audience. Furthermore, I will retract my initial argument as invalid based on faulty context.

Speaking from the experience of essentially running a PC repair shop for over 7 years, I have to say that's a GROSS miscalculation of your client base. Every one of your clients should have virus protection.

To address another section of your posts...

As for my use of the word "cost", I was never talking about money, I thought that was clear from context but I guess it was not. I was talking about its undeniable impact on system resources. Not to underestimate the success of Microsoft's Security Essentials suite, but I find it kinda funny that you would hire the same company to protect your computer as the one that created the security holes in the first place. Now, I know of course there are distinctly different programmers on the job, but they are all held to the same standards of employment and oversight.

Firstly, MSE is pretty inconsequential to the resources of a computer. Secondly, Microsoft doesn't "create" security holes. I'd like to see a single program that doesn't have vulnerability without additional updates. You can't make a perfect program for release, there are way too many factors in the coding. Maybe you should try creating an operating system and see how many security holes you "create".

 

[NiGHTS]

Speaking from the experience of essentially running a PC repair shop for over 7 years, I have to say that's a GROSS miscalculation of your client base. Every one of your clients should have virus protection.

All my clients have virus protection as a requirement, but I never totally agreed with it because they are offline PC's in locked-in hardware running dedicated software. The recommendations I made erroneously were to at most 2 client's home PC's who I had some confidence in their level of experience only to find that I was wrong.

Firstly, MSE is pretty inconsequential to the resources of a computer. Secondly, Microsoft doesn't "create" security holes. I'd like to see a single program that doesn't have vulnerability without additional updates. You can't make a perfect program for release, there are way too many factors in the coding. Maybe you should try creating an operating system and see how many security holes you "create".

I used the word "create" in the sense that if you create a brick wall and it has a hole in it because you missed a brick, by reason of logic, you created the hole. Obviously no one wants to create security holes on purpose, but if they built the software, they built the holes by simple algebraic reasoning.

And weather or not the impact to the PC is minimal on a modern desktop, in most cases your right, but not everyone has a modern PC, and older PCs don't do well with software that puts an extra load on the hard drive.

 

[KSoD]

While any program can be hacked, this is true. While all people know that programs such as Firefox are updated regularly, this is also true. But you have to be prepared for the time frame between the flaw found and the time the flaw is patched. It is no good having up to date software if a flaw is found and a patch put out 2 hours later just to find out you were a victim within that time frame.

So while you maybe correct that some measures are not needed, that is only correct for a percentage of time where there is no flaws being found and possibly exploited.

I mean no dis-respect, but being someone who has dealt with more than my fair share of such issues, i know that even with such browsers as Firefox fully updated and using such things as NoScript, Flash Block and so on you are still open for infections and attacks. Within the program itself not due to Windows either. There is nothing saying that all of the extensions a person is running is fully secure. Which is more of a risk than not having a fully patched system.

Yes it sounds funny that people put their trust in a company that not only creates the OS in use, but the protection made for it. But at the same time, who knows the product better than the same people who make it?

The same argument can be made about *NIX and OS X. How many infections have come out for both recently? More than their fair share.

So my point being that yes, everything is only as secure as the person using it, there is also a time when even that person is not secure. No flaw is patched instantly and no patch is ever 100% effective.

The main point is that we never suggest to our members such actions that we do ourselves. While we may know a few to have experience, for the most part we try to suggest it for the "common user". They wouldnt be in the Virus Section on a Tech Forum looking for assistance with Anti-Virus software if they knwe how to keep themselves protected.

 

[NiGHTS]

In response to Mak213, Well said and point taken.

 

[hikaricloud]

And weather or not the impact to the PC is minimal on a modern desktop, in most cases your right, but not everyone has a modern PC, and older PCs don't do well with software that puts an extra load on the hard drive.

So by your logic, if it's an old PC, there's no reason to put an antivirus program on it?

We put MSE on EVERY machine, including old P4s with a lack of RAM. It runs perfectly fine. The only machines it would be difficult to install on would be anything older than say, 10 years (especially considering MSE only works on XP and up). At which point, an antivirus is the least of their problems.

As for space on the hard drive, on the computer I'm typing from right now, the program files are using a whopping 13.5mb of space and a few mb of RAM. Like I said: inconsequential. MSE takes up the least amount of resources out of every other program with an active shield...at least out of the programs that are worth anything.

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Now, as a word of advice from my experience with customers, and it may sound cynical, but you should never really trust a customer when they say they have enough experience to run without an AV. I've had customers that brought in machines for system cleans try to tell me they didn't need one, and they spent at least 50% of their time surfing porn by looking at their history.

If you want a more shrewd way of doing business, you COULD go with the "customer is always right" mentality, don't give them AV protection, and charge them again when the viruses come back in a week or two. Of course, I don't opt for that route because I have a conscious, but everyone is different.

 

[office politics]

I've seen MSE use 50-55k of memory on a laptop last night. I checked this while only real-time scanning was enabled. How much memory is it using on the pcs ou install it on?