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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?
My mother only needs the browser for web and e-mail + she needs some place to store some photos. So since I see her only once every few months (this is how often I come out of the basement ;) ) and since she started having some problems with viruses and spyware I replaced the old sour windows xp with ubuntu on her machine and she's been surfing away happily ever since. I personally detest any localization when it comes to software but she likes it.
I'm however running vista ... because I need to :/
He is kind of correct though, on my Athlon64/Via K8T800/NV GF6800le whatever version which used the text based installer worked. But once they switched to the live-CD with installer approach the machine couldn't boot into the GUI so no live-anything and no installation.
I have no idea if it is like that for plenty of people and true for all versions since then but it was for sure for that one.
At that time I only needed a dist with a kernel new enough* to mount Solaris UFS and OS X HFSX+ though so I just installed plain debian with it's no live-cd, no bullshit approach, which obviously worked.
* And yes, I know how to download and compile a kernel but since I'd rather been running FreeBSD or Solaris instead of Linux for the last couple of years and how most distributions seems to tweak the kernel configuration to their likening I didn't wanted to compile a vanilla one just to end up with a system which refused to boot it because it relied on some extra things which I would had to figure out and work around. Less mess and more things done thank you.