Free anti-virus and firewall software

[Chewy]

I gave up on adaware a while back, it seemed too hard to learn and I prefered spybot,
without teatimer, I still use spybot and immunize tho, make sure that you don't have any 2 anti-malwares running at the same time. I wish I had never loaded defender. You might run spybot after a scan with superanti... and see if it picks anything up

[locoeng]

I was impressed with the speed of the scanning of this new program...seems as if adaware and spybot would take forever, but this one churned right through all 150 gigs of data pretty quickly and that was on the "thourough" scan. TBH, I haven't ran adaware in a while myself, I shouldn't have taken care of the files SAS found and ran the other programs as a cross-check.

[paglamon]

Thanks Chewy. Super Antispyware seems to be doing a super job.

[Chewy]

it's highly reccomended over at bleepingcomputer, the specialists

[MilesAhead]

I was impressed with the speed of the scanning of this new program...seems as if adaware and spybot would take forever, but this one churned right through all 150 gigs of data pretty quickly and that was on the "thourough" scan. TBH, I haven't ran adaware in a while myself, I shouldn't have taken care of the files SAS found and ran the other programs as a cross-check.

I think SuperAntiSpyware and Ad-Aware use signature scans, making them very fast. Lately I've been using Avast! for virus protection but it scans entire files. Checking large downloads takes forever. I installed AVG free 7.5 just for quickie file & folder signature scans.

The main drawback with Avast! is you have to disable http access protection while doing system backups or burning discs. Otherwise weird things happen. But you can disable from the tray icon then turn it back on to surf the web. For free it ain't bad.


From what I've seen so far SAS and Ad-Aware had similar results on my machine 'cept Ad-Aware warns you about MRU lists. With all these virus/spyware scanners that install services I set the service to Manual. If it won't work without automatic start at boot then I uninstall and look for something that will.

[Chewy]

adaware left a service running on my box after I tested it and told it to not load at startup-17 megs-seemed to behave itself-reminds me of nprotect(norton's)

[MilesAhead]

adaware left a service running on my box after I tested it and told it to not load at startup-17 megs-seemed to behave itself-reminds me of nprotect(norton's)

I just meant set the service to Manual so it won't start at system startup. Even then if you leave your PC on all the time then you'd have to remember to stop the service after the scans are done. Once it does a scan Ad-Aware just leaves the service running even if it's set to Manual. I shut down every night and might not use Ad-Aware for a couple of days, so it's worth it for me to set it Manual.

Esp. with Vista my HD would be thrashing all the time unless I neutralized as much background crud as possible. The other day I found some media player I never used was cataloging media files I don't have and running my HD. It is annoying!!! It if wasn't for the fact that my Lan behaves better since I added the Vista machine I'd prolly XPify it!!

[Chewy]

having a lan with xp pro is a breeze as long as your best computer boots first, with vista then it's probably the default server if you are running a premium version

media player 11 is the devil, am going to wipe 2 computers because of it

[locoeng]

this associated service to find out what's running on your computer seems top-notch also

http://www.fileresearchcenter.com/

This site found nothing "bad" on my PC, but there were 8 unrecognized programs anywhere from NeroCheck to uTorrent. Forwarded the files for examination so we shall see if anything naughty is really there.

I also ran Spybot S&D and it also found the NewDotNet entry that was quarantined through SAS, but it was in it's origianl location...any ideas? It also found 6 other problems that SAS didn't pick up on.

[Chewy]

spybot always picks up a lot of harmless cookies

neither will catch a trojan that's in stealth and reinfecting your computer

[MilesAhead]

dunno what it is now

having a lan with xp pro is a breeze as long as your best computer boots first, with vista then it's probably the default server if you are running a premium version

media player 11 is the devil, am going to wipe 2 computers because of it

Hmmm I took WMP 11 off completely, but I see I have some of that MS Works stuff on here. MS apps are famous for COM servers you have to track down and unregister before uninstalling!!! I wish there was an easy test to see if XP pro had all the drivers for this system but anyway I hate to fix things that aren't broken. Just have to see if I can stop the HD being worked. It's prolly the MS Works stuff, even though I've never opened any of the apps.

I remember having to deal with a lot of this with XP also but Vista is even sneakier.

[Chewy]

well since I gave up on fixing xp after installing MP 11, it was too deep in the registry, I deleted the system partition and did a clean install with xp/sp2
did the integrated updates with a few tweaks(no more mp11)

only 16 processes running and 400+ megs free out of 512

there's a new spybot now, will review it on this virgin install

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd15/index.html

change log is very impressive

[MilesAhead]

I found some explanations on the site you mentioned (Bleeping Computer) of some of the Vista Windows Features. Turns out one of them is yet another Network File Syncing gizmo!
I thought I turned all that stuff off!!! Sheesh!! Maybe that will quiet my drive. btw have you heard of a utility called SuperCopier2?? I see some mention in forums about explorer shell replacements that speed up slow Vista file copy.

[Chewy]

Chewy no Vista, XP was resource hog enough

Maybe when I get a quad core, and 4 gigs of ram?

[MilesAhead]

Chewy no Vista, XP was resource hog enough

Maybe when I get a quad core, and 4 gigs of ram?

Yeah, I was getting all psyched waiting for the AMD quad core machine to come out with L3 cache. Then I realized they were talking about a cpu for servers!! The nitty-gritty for the desktop machine AMD quad is still under wraps I guess.

I'm going to give TeraCopy a try. Supposedly MS came out with a hotfix for the Vista slow copy problem but I'll wait for SP1.