Friday, March 30, 2007
Avast Antivirus To The Rescue - Again!
One of my smaller home-office clients called EARLY this morning, and was having problems with their personal computer. It was acting sluggish, their firewall was going nuts, and their browser homepage was hijacked.
I told them to have McAfee VirusScan Plus 2007 scan the system, and by the time I got there, I'd check out the results. When I got there, McAfee was STILL running, after two hours. After it finally wrapped up, it didn't find squat. It gleefully chimed there were no viruses, while the CPU was still running some hidden application and the firewall was going crazy.
Luckily, Lavasoft AdAware sniffed out the bastard that was running in the background, in under a minute. Their firewall was preventing all the outbound spam messages. AdAware sniped the bot, easy as pie. I ran SpyBot Search & Destroy, and it cleared out a few other small issues. Man, I love the AdAware / SpyBot S&D tag team!
Not pleased with McAfee sitting there like a lump, hogging almost 25% of the system resources and giving nothing in return, I talked my client into letting me replace it. We loaded the critically acclaimed (CNET scored it a 5 out of 5, tied for their top antivirus pick) FREE Avast Antivirus Home Edition, and registered it. Upon it's initial startup, it scanned the resident memory, and found nothing (AdAware had already done it's work). We ran a boot-time scan, and Avast found several infected files that McAfee failed to notice. Nice!
My client is upgrading to the Avast Professional Edition (same one we I use at the office) for $40. Unfortunately, there's no refund available for McAfee, but at least it licenses them to make rescue disks in the event of a boot-sector virus. I also clued them into the FREE AVG Antivirus (tied with Avast for CNET's top antivirus pick), as a good second opinion.
Click Here For Free Avast Antirivus Home Edition
I told them to have McAfee VirusScan Plus 2007 scan the system, and by the time I got there, I'd check out the results. When I got there, McAfee was STILL running, after two hours. After it finally wrapped up, it didn't find squat. It gleefully chimed there were no viruses, while the CPU was still running some hidden application and the firewall was going crazy.
Luckily, Lavasoft AdAware sniffed out the bastard that was running in the background, in under a minute. Their firewall was preventing all the outbound spam messages. AdAware sniped the bot, easy as pie. I ran SpyBot Search & Destroy, and it cleared out a few other small issues. Man, I love the AdAware / SpyBot S&D tag team!
Not pleased with McAfee sitting there like a lump, hogging almost 25% of the system resources and giving nothing in return, I talked my client into letting me replace it. We loaded the critically acclaimed (CNET scored it a 5 out of 5, tied for their top antivirus pick) FREE Avast Antivirus Home Edition, and registered it. Upon it's initial startup, it scanned the resident memory, and found nothing (AdAware had already done it's work). We ran a boot-time scan, and Avast found several infected files that McAfee failed to notice. Nice!
My client is upgrading to the Avast Professional Edition (same one we I use at the office) for $40. Unfortunately, there's no refund available for McAfee, but at least it licenses them to make rescue disks in the event of a boot-sector virus. I also clued them into the FREE AVG Antivirus (tied with Avast for CNET's top antivirus pick), as a good second opinion.
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