Topic: Favorite anti-virus?

[Alieo]

Okay so if Windows 8 now has this Windows Defender built into it... why do I keep getting an offer to activate my trial of Trend Micro? What do y'all think of Trend Micro? I'll wait to hear what y'all think before I do anything about it... y'all! (Y'all just HAD to read another "y'all" in there, huh y'all?)

[Pumo]

Well, I don't like Trend Micro at all.

I did use their anti-virus back in the past, but it usually tends to slow down the system, and  I've had several virus attacks even with the anti-virus activated, so it's a bad one for me (as well as Norton, another bad experience I had).

In short, and IMHO: Stay away from Norton and Trend Micro.

The only thing I liked a bit about Trend Micro was their online anti-virus for quick checking files, but I don't know if it still works nowadays.

I would insist, use either Avast! or Windows Security Ess./Defender.

[-<WillyP>-]

I'll second what Pumo said.

I also use Spybot Search and Destroy, and HitmanPro.

[Matthew]

Okay so if Windows 8 now has this Windows Defender built into it... why do I keep getting an offer to activate my trial of Trend Micro? What do y'all think of Trend Micro? I'll wait to hear what y'all think before I do anything about it... y'all! (Y'all just HAD to read another "y'all" in there, huh y'all?)

Because manufacturers partner with antivirus and other companies to get more money.

[Sidhe Priest]

SIGH. You'd better downgrade to XP or something decent, anything starting with Vista is paranoid schisophrene.

Anyway, the best paid antivirus is Kaspersky's AV. Kills anything, plenty of stuff that AVG and Avast and the like won't ever catch.

A good free antivirus is Avira.

[Scyphi]

SIGH. You'd better downgrade to XP or something decent, anything starting with Vista is paranoid schisophrene.

Not the Windows 7 that I've been using for the past two or three years. Dunno what Windows system you use, but it apparently not the same thing I've been using. 

[Sidhe Priest]

It's a heavily modded XP which has no traces of MS cretinism in it (e. g. the shells are EVWM/Geoshell, both pretty comfortable, the file manager is Total Commander, etc.). In W7 there's a lot of madness around pseudo-root privileges and its stupid network division into home/public has been a source of worry for a little pet company whose manager often calls for support. Not to mention the GUI has degenerated, you can't even open a start menu directory with a hover or single click as in the normal explorer shell of XP and below. It's just degenerate, XP had its own annoyances and insanity (like SFC and prefetcher), but it is fixable with a simple script. Anything above it has degenerated horribly.

[Sidhe Priest]

Avira has its quirks, and it loves to spam the user with "buy the paid version" windows, but it does have much better detection than either Avast, AVG, or any other free antivirus. These two really are sloppy, look for free AV rankings/tests, they won't ever rank high.

[Matthew]

Sidhe, it seems to me that perhaps Windows is not the OS for you, and you should use Linux?

[Sidhe Priest]

Well no, actually Windows ought to be made right from start. There's too much fluff and bad design in there. For instance, instead of burdening everyone with stupid "public/home" net separation (and useless firewall in XP), vulnerable services like RPC (the source of the Blaster worm) had to be turned on by demand (just like file-sharing) for LAN filesharing. It's as simple as that, the same with junk like VBScript - why invite virus-writing by making a system-wide script system that could do anything open to anyone (in the first versions it could be activated through plain HTML pages)?

And the UI just has to be straightforward, no insane delayed multi-click menus and schisophrenic categories in Control Panel instead of normal applets. It's all so simple, but they're so bloated with pride, they consider whichever mad caprice possesses them to be what everyone has to be shoved into. How difficult is preserving a simple start menu as in Windows 95? Nobody needs the extra bloat/stupidity added in later versions anyway. A GUI has to work at the speed of thought and never make itself noticeable, it's just an interface, a function. Not something that constantly buggers the user.

[Kaiaatzl]

Yeah, but everybody knows Microsoft is an idiot .  The people who use Windows use it because they like the rest of it enough to not mind that.  You're not sounding like someone who likes the rest of it enough to not mind that.
If you don't like it and the things you don't like aren't going to get fixed anytime soon, then why not use a different OS?  Especially one that's free.  The alternative is to just keep complaining, and eventually you're just using Windows as an excuse to complain when you could have freed yourself from it long ago. 
Complaining doesn't solve your problems.  Doing something about your problems solves your problems.  Complaining about a problem when you're not giving the people you're complaining to any good reason you're not solving the problem yourself is called whining.  And it accomplishes nothing.

On a lighter note, I personally use Windows Vista, and even though I can understand the problems other people see in it, they don't bother me.

[Sidhe Priest]

The solution is hacking it all, and never using bundled MS apps. Then it won't bother. Every single bit of it that's a bother and can be fixed with something better, must be.

[Kaiaatzl]

Go ahead if you want to.  That's certainly a solution.
But don't expect the rest of us to do the same .  We probably don't care about it enough for it to bother us in the first place.

It's a travesty, I know .

[Sidhe Priest]

Are you trying to be annoying? 'cause seriously it's a matter of others' [in]sanity whether they're careless enough. Carelessness, by itself, is madness though.

[Sidhe Priest]

In other news, the old Audigy-2 Creative drivers apparently can't stand the new multicore CPU, SIGH. So whether it'll all work is a matter of drivers that work...