winston.smith
Joined: 11 Nov 2015 Posts: 5
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Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2015 4:26 pm Post subject: Antivir, malwarebytes, clamwin, ad-aware for starters |
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Antivir, Malwarebytes, Clamwin (portable) and Ad-Aware for starters. Also Ccleaner and StartUp.
The first in the list, Antivir is by the german Avira. They've been going for quite some time and their antivirus is very good. They also offer various other anti-malware products, many free and most with premium versions. They promte these quite heavily during the use of the free products and they also have the tick boxes for the installation of third party offers, so be aware of this during the install process. All the same the free anti virus from Avira is excellent. It runs (extremely well) in the background and will even detect dodgy websites without installing any extra software. It offers live protection, but also allows custom scans from single files or folders (including archives to various levels) to full drive or system scans.
However, no matter what antivirus software you use, there is always the chance something gets through. This is the case whether you use freeware, open source or premium. So I would suggest using more than one antimalware solution. Unfortunately many antivirus products don't like playing with one another. They will see one another's virus definition tables as threats. I have found that ClamWin portable (use the portable version) to work quite well with most other antimalware programs. Clamwin does not run in the background. It is better to use this as a secondary scan before or after using Avira. That way if Avira misses something ClamWin portable may pick it up.
I would also recommend Malwarebytes, Ad-Aware. CCleaner is also excellent, but needs to be used with caution. It assumes you know what you are doing and which files are necessary for windows to work. So if you find something that Ccleaner says is infected and it is a system file and you have Ccleaner remove it your system may become unbootable. The solution to this scenario would be to find a copy of the same file from another system, install media or an earlier backup. So if you don't backup, backup.
There's also a little known tool called StartUp by Mike Lin which can be found at the most excellent site Majorgeeks. This tiny little tool will monitor and log which programs load on windows startup and allows (in most situations) to prevent programs from loading on startup. Basically it gives excellent control of the windows startup process and can help deal with pesky programs you don't want loading on startup and slowing the system down. It may even get around uninstalling programs that don't want to be uninstalled, though there are full blown applications that do this more thoroughly StartUp is a nifty little tool, all the same.
If your system isn't very fast don't install too much or try and use portable versions along with one or two main programs. |
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