Recommend me an antivirus

[Stu DemonD]

If you are into torrenting, then Zonealarm is awful, and falls down due to too many connections I believe. It seemed to revolve around the True Vector service.

I rely purely on a hardware firewall, built into the router. Plus of course NOD32 as my "on access" scanner.

 

[bludvl_x19]

Thanks Papa P, you just solved one of my problems.

After asking everyone, and downloading AVG, I had a harder look, and installed but not active was Sophos, an AV program.

Having them both running (not intentionally) slowed my computer to a crawl.

Thanks guys!!

 

[Papa P]

Oh, thats what I meant to add....if your place of work has Sophos installed on your work PCs then you are allowed to install a single copy of Sophos at home for free!

Your workplace can give you a username and password and a link to the download site for the software.

Or at least our NHS licence with Sophos allows us our staff to install it at home.

I reccomend people to use AVG if they ask my opinion though!

 

[bludvl_x19]

Oh, thats what I meant to add....if your place of work has Sophos installed on your work PCs then you are allowed to install a single copy of Sophos at home for free!

Your workplace can give you a username and password and a link to the download site for the software.

Or at least our NHS licence with Sophos allows us our staff to install it at home.

I reccomend people to use AVG if they ask my opinion though!

This is a work computer/laptop. I may have requesitioned it from my father, with or without his knowledge

 

[Ucof]

If you are into torrenting, then Zonealarm is awful, and falls down due to too many connections I believe. It seemed to revolve around the True Vector service.

I rely purely on a hardware firewall, built into the router. Plus of course NOD32 as my "on access" scanner.

I did loads of torrenting at one time and had zonealarm installed, never had any problem with it. Our top speed was 200k/s download. I don't understand about the too many connections issue. Can you elaborate on it a bit more please? Was it something you experienced, or something you heard? Usually if you say "Allow" to a program, it lets you have as many connections as the program wants. Are you sure you set the router up to open the required ports?

Also, with regards to the firewall, it isn't so much the inbound traffic, rather the outbound traffic you need to be careful of - router firewalls don't (as a rule of thumb) bother with any outbound traffic monitoring.

 

[Eklipze3k]

IIRC the connection issue would probably have been a combination of ZA creating lots of connections for it's own use, and XP limiting the total number of TCP connections to something silly like 50. Essentially what that meant was that ZA would create it's 15 connections, you'd maybe have 5 for various other programs which would only leave you 30 that could be used for torrents - so even though that film you've been after for ages has 2,000 seeders, you'll only benefit from 30 of them.

Ofc, I could be wrong but Stu and I seem to be on the same wavelength for the other things he's mentioned ...

 

[Stu DemonD]

Take a read here then:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=42905

Zone Alarm is the broken software here, causing problems with just about every P2P app there. Its True Vector service even crashes computers, and with the latest security update for Windows, completely breaks your internet.

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=271767#p271767

And as for downloading at 200KB/s - that is nothing to write home about, even my home line here can hit 2.3MB/s on downloads.

All I know was that whenever I had ZA installed, and left my PC on overnight to torrent, I would come downstairs in the morning to a True Vector error message caused by ZA, and my whole 'net connection screwed. Of course, getting rid of ZA cured all my problems. I have not had any issues with this PC since.

 

[Ucof]

Ahhh.. interesting.
Though that same article(the first post of the first link) does say:

Well i uninstalled zonealarm and it still didn't work

And as for

Its True Vector service even crashes computers, and with the latest security update for Windows, completely breaks your internet.

- that was a Microsoft update that did that, it had nothing to do with Zonelabs. In fact, if I remember rightly, Zonelabs provided 2 (I think) walkarounds on the same day the problem happened to bypass/ solve the problem until Microsoft released an updated patch. However, I will admit that it only affected Zonealarm installed PCs - however, it was working until Microsoft touched it

As for downloading at 200k/s that was 2 and a half years ago, when we were on a 1mb line, a LONG way from the exchange. It was the best we ever got through uTorrent - I wasn't saying "Ooooh look how fast a speed we got!"

 

[Stu DemonD]

As for downloading at 200k/s that was 2 and a half years ago, when we were on a 1mb line, a LONG way from the exchange. It was the best we ever got through uTorrent - I wasn't saying "Ooooh look how fast a speed we got!"

Ah, I wasn't getting at the speed either, just with faster speeds, you have more open connections, and this is where I tried to be come from sorry for the misunderstanding.

I have installed ZA at various times during the lifetime of this PC, and each time I had true vector issues. The last time [over a year ago] I decided to give up on it totally. I don't know many on the torrent forum I frequent who actually use it either.

The funny thing is, I don't even P2P on this PC anymore

 

[Ucof]

I dont P2P at all now other than free or open source stuff.

No worries about the misunderstanding - it's t'Internet - it happens all the time

 

[Stu DemonD]

I dont P2P at all now other than free or open source stuff.

Oh, I still P2P - just do it via a dedicated server [see my sig]

 

[truckerg]

i use avast i used avg for ages but it seems to have started slowing my machine down
might try that nod 32 one though

 

[fenton_jd]

I run a combination of Spybot S&D for (obviously) spyware, and AVAST for antivirus and OPERA or FIREFOX as my internet browser

My PC is a good 4-5 years old but runs flawlessy.

I ran spybot S&D scan the other day, and it found NO SPYWARE on my PC at all.