I wrote a quick article a couple days ago about the Avast meltdown, which caused me no small amount of stress, not only from thinking my kids had gotten one of the computers on my network infected, but also from having to go back and clean up after the mess it caused. Essentially it started tagging everything as infected. Initially I was deleting infected items, but then moved to quarantining them when it seemed something was amiss.
As I promised, not because I have an ax to grind with Avast – anyone can make a mistake, and it’s hard to complain about a problem with free software – I moved to Avira. I don’t have a lot to say about it, other than it installed easily, kept up with it’s updates, and didn’t seem to be overly heavy on resources. It’s hard to really test out an AV program without an infected machine to test it on. Maybe the next one that comes to my front door will be a good test of Avira’s skills. Usually I’ll use my tool of choice to clean up all it can find, and then toss another vendor at it to see if anything was missed. (BTW, I learned this from Norton AV. It used to be somewhat of a commonplace thing to have someone bring me an infected PC that had an up-to-date copy of Norton installed and running. Norton would proclaim the PC clean, and a quick pass with AVG would catch the remaining infections).
Anyway, I didn’t stick with Avira long, mainly because I’ve been wanting to test out Microsoft’s Security Essentials. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no big fan of Microsoft. If it weren’t for specific software and games my kids and wife uses, I’d be a Linux-only shop. BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, my theory is that who is better prepared to protect and clean the Windows OS than Microsoft? After all, it IS their code!
So, it’s MSE on my 2 Windows XP machines now. So far so good. It seems to be happy doing it’s thing, which is leaving me alone while I’m trying to work.
