Reliable, Free Anti-Virus Software?

oahazmatt writes "Some time ago my wife was having severe issues on her laptop. (A Dell Inspiron, if that helps.) I eventually found the cause to be McAfee, which took about an hour to remove fully. I installed AVG on her system to replace McAfee, but we have since found that AVG is causing problems with her laptop's connection to our wireless network. She's not thrilled about a wired connection as the router is on the other end of the house. We're looking for some good, open-source or free personal editions of anti-virus software. So, who on Slashdot trusts what?" When school required a Windows laptop, I used Clam AV, and the machine seemed to do as well as most classmates'. What have you found that works?

Comments

I second the mention of ClamWin

[tepples]

When school required a Windows laptop, I used Clam AV

I second the mention of ClamWin. The biggest missing feature in ClamWin is scanning every file on fopen(), and that's what usually causes the resource hogging behavior that some people believe to be typical of antivirus. In my experience, a computer user really doesn't need real-time operation unless he's looking at pr0n (erotic web sites), downloading w4r3z (infringing copies of proprietary commercial software), or doing something comparably dangerous. A weekly full scan is enough.

Re:Clam AV

[Epsillon]

ClamAV, as it stands, does not do on-access scanning. I quite dislike the way the Win32 version (ClamWin) installs a little Clam icon into the system tray, as a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.

MoonSecure is a scanner/heuristics engine that uses Clam's signatures and does perform on-access scanning but, when I last tried it, it had "issues".

Avast is my current recommendation of the freebies for personal use, followed by Avira, if you can stand the constant nagging about upgrading to paid versions. Avira's detection rate, last I looked, was slightly better than Avast's but the nag screens are a bone of contention. Also have a look at Comodo's offerings. Note that none of these are free software, just free to use. MoonSecure is GPL'd and may have become a little better since I tried it, so it may be worth a shot if freedom matters to you.

Try this: no antivirus

[Matt Perry]

I'm serious. Stop doing the things that put you at risk for viruses and you won't have to run anti-virus. I don't run anti-virus or anti-spyware software on my computer and I've never had a problem. Occasionally, just to verify that I'm doing the right thing, I boot from a BartPE Windows CD and run anti-virus and anti-spyware tools against my hard drive. They never find anything bad. The last time I had a virus was in 1989 on my Amiga 500.

Re:Try this: no antivirus

[nine-times]

I'd say that you're right, except that you're ignoring one source of problems: stupid people. Stupid people can't "stop doing things that put [them] at risk for viruses" because they aren't smart enough to understand the difference between risky behavior and safe behavior. Even if you explain it to them, they won't understand it, and they'll forget your instructions.

Ok, to be fair, it's not just stupid people. There are smart people who simply don't have the computer or security expertise necessary to be able to understand the difference between a safe download and a risky one. They don't understand, and they have other things to do besides spending all their time learning, investigating, and figuring it out.

For those people, it helps to secure the system through various methods, one of which might be an AV program.

Re:You could use

[hairyfeet]

In case you wanted an ACTUAL answer,and not just a bunch of geeks shouting Linux I would suggest either Comodo if you would like one with a built in firewall,or AntiVir if you just need AV. As a Windows repairman I have used both on many customers machines and they work quite well.

I know that shouting "Linux" is a great way to Karma whore here,but the simple fact is I'm sure he asked about Windows Av for a reason. Sometimes Linux simply isn't the right tool for the job,as anyone who has tried to get those damned Lexmark all in ones to work or run into one of the bazillion SMBs that have custom VB apps that are mission critical can tell you.

No Easy

[Kludge]

Don't get me wrong, "Switch to Ubuntu" (or some other linux distribution) may be the perfect answers for this woman, and that would be great - but let's be realistic here and not label that as an easy solution.

Obviously if MS were "easy", this guy would not be posting a question to the this web site. Apparently neither he nor this woman know what to do about MS's glaring security holes.

I do not think that the parent post is saying Ubuntu will be easy. It was just easy for him to think of a solution.

Re:Easy

[Godji]

Posts like this lead to another, very important point. The reason we don't have a (good) free software antivirus program* is because that's a hard problem that the free software community does not have a large need to solve. The reason why there is no large need to solve the virus problem is, you guessed it, Linux. Every free software developer, given the choice of dedicating their free time on on antivirus or [insert cool project here], will certainly choose [insert cool project here].

Re:Easy

[couchslug]

"Posts like this lead to another, very important point. "

Fixing the problems of an operating system sold by a bitter opponent of Open and Free software is not a wise choice for a proponent of Open or Free software.

Capturing market share for applications like Firefox helps grab mindshare, and developing alternate operating systems gives that mindshare somewhere to go post-Windows.

Doing for Redmond what Redmond does not do for itself while not getting paid is arguably stupid.

Re:Easy

[niiler]

Interestingly enough, it's related a problem we're going to have to start dealing with. Let me explain. I tend to promote OSS to students, largely because they are too poor to afford anything better. Many have MSWorks and NOT MSOffice on their computers or other limitations. So I recommend products like OpenOffice.org or VLC player (among others dependent on the need). Some of these folks, instead of following my links to the real websites, Google OpenOffice and are finding third party knock-offs, that they claim are installing viruses/spyware on their machines.

So the free-software community's problem is that while we generally tell people to take our source code and do *whatever* with it, some malware writers (on Windows, at least), have noted that this provides an opportunity to them. Is a good anti-virus a fix? Probably not. Rather, there needs to be a way for non-discriminating users to tell that they don't have the original distribution. I can't think of how to do this off the top of my head, but suspect it may mean that code is cryptographically certified before it can be considered to be secure. And of course, this opens up a huge can of worms.

Re:For perverse definitions of Easy

[the_bard17]

Ignoring for a moment that Linux -has- its share of malware

There has not yet been a single widespread Linux malware threat of the type that Microsoft Windows software currently faces

Oh, I don't think that Wikipedia's all that bad. *grin*

Honestly, though, I do agree with you. As much as running Linux may be an answer to the "problem", it's not the answer. I've tried converting people over to Linux, and it takes a lot of effort to get their mindset shifted over from Windows to Linux. I've found that if they're apathetic to Windows, they're not going to switch... it takes actual desire on their part to move to something better.

Re:Easy

[PopeRatzo]

Maybe the guy who posted the original question about anitivirus should have restated the question a bit, as in:

"I am a music producer who uses Sonar/Ableton Live/Cubase/ProTools/Gigasampler/take your pick of pro audio software. There is absolutely no pro audio software available for Linux that is anywhere near ready for professional work, nor are there stable drivers for professional audio hardware that are ready for prime time (without workarounds like Jack). Since I've used Gigasampler for a decade, a Mac is not an option for me.

NOW does anyone know of a free antivirus software that is dependable and relatively trouble-free? etc etc."

Now I like Linux quite a bit and I use it extensively in my work for off-loading effects and rendering cycles (Reaper does this very nicely) and for storage and many other important duties. But sometimes, there simply isn't a viable option to non-Linux operating system. Maybe it won't always be so. I try every new version of Ubuntu Studio and brave the frustration of using Jack.

The guy made a simple and sincere request, and the constant refrains of "you'd be better off if you used Linux" are not only unhelpful, but rude and wrong.

Re:Easy

[vadim_t]

Err, no. MD5/SHA checks provide no security. They only let you verify that a file wasn't corrupted in transit. Such things are generally freak accidents and very uncommon, and are mainly useful for checking things like that yep, that CD image was indeed 300MB in size and nothing got cut off anywhere.

If you find a shady site, and download a .rpm or .deb from there, nothing stops them from providing the matching checksum.

Proper security is attained by GPG signatures.

Re:For perverse definitions of Easy

[DaveWick79]

Not only does it take actual desire on their part to move to something better, it takes actual realization that for a lot of people, Linux does not qualify as "better" for their particular usage. It may just be a matter of going into a support forum (something linux users seem to know alot about) and getting some answers as to why AVG is interfering with the wireless connection in the first place. Perhaps submitting a support request with a bug report would be enough to get the problem fixed with the next program update.

What I resent most is a linux junkie who tells a user that "ubuntu is better, therefore thou must switch to my better OS" with no regard for the hassle it is for that user to get acclimated to new software, find software to replace existing software, and get used to an entirely new interface, even if the interface is judged to be better and more intuitive by said linux junkie, and then still having to dual-boot windows on the machine to run games.