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Ask Slashdot: Light-Footprint Antivirus For Windows XP?
New submitter Bauermlb writes "I service computers for retired folks in my community, often older machines with modest speed (2 GHz Centron) and modest memory (512 MB). Adding AVAST to one of these machines slows it to a crawl. Any recommendations for a light-duty antivirus program with a low overhead? (These people do not tend to surf 'dirty' sites.)"
There is no such thing as a safe website. These days any site can wind up hosting malware via banner ads that inject code.
AVG is relatively lightweight but I would suggest you test it and others on some of your target hardware.
I've seen way better performance with it than with McAfee, Avast, etc.
Detection benchmarks typically put it on par with the other free solutions, though it changes from month to month.
Seems a reasonable bet... http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/379933/avira-free-antivirus-13
Microsoft is killing updates for XP in a little under 9 months. Get them onto linux or a new PC or it may not matter how good of an antivirus you put on there after that.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
A very real and practical solution to be considered.
I find the biggest challenge is user expectation. When you say the word "Linux", many assume it's hard, weird or too different. If you can get past that and folks actually try it, they discover - to their delight - it's easy to use, intuitive and more importantly robust. At that point, the challenge is getting them to let go so someone else can have a run at it.
Ad networks/common popular websites have been compromised repeatedly in the past and will be compromised repeatedly in the future. All sites could be considered "dirty sites".
This is totally true, but not even the whole story; a site need not be compromised to serve up malware. For a while, Foreign Policy's website was serving up malware once in a while through one of the advertising networks. Google released a comprehensive study of drive-by malware attacks that explicitly stated that the nature of content a person looked at was no longer germane to their safety from such attacks.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) has more than doubled among middle-aged adults and the elderly over the last decade....
It's actually a growing* problem in retirement homes.
*n.p.i.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In my experience it is so much easier to avoid the whole problem of Windows malware, simply by installing Linux. I tell my friends that I don't do Windows. They then assume I use a Mac - I use a Mac too, so that isn't wrong. When I tell them that I can install something on their computer that will make it work almost exactly the same as a Mac, then they actually get interested and once they have Linux with XFCE running, they never look back.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think he is getting confused and meant to type Centrino which was, at sometime a marketing/branding term for an Intel Reference Design consisting of Chipset, CPU and Wifi. Either way, they wrote it wrong, but lurkers from the past would have recognized it. It was posted on a lot of laptop stickers in the same way Pentium 4, Core X, etc are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino
As for /. letting this through... things have changed, have you been gone for the past 3 years?
maybe have a look at this:
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/windows-xp/marapr-2013/
I think it will still work under XP. After the initial scan it should be pretty light on local resources.
Not true. Firefox + fireclam addon. Thunderbird + clamdrib (tho you have to work to find it)
That's not on-access, that's on-access-through-a-specific-application.
More Twoson than Cupertino