UKC

Just wondering what are peoples opinions on which is the most effective FREE software?

In reply to Andy Mountains: Microsoft's Security Essentials would be my first choice. After all the usuals like AVG Free, Avast etc.

In reply to Andy Mountains:

AVG continues to work for me

In reply to Andy Mountains:

What the other chap said. Microsoft Security Essentials and then either AVG Free or Avast.

Or slightly more left field, but you could always get a mac or a linux machine.

In reply to Andy Mountains: Another vote for Microsoft security essentials. Watch out for some anti virus programmes that are very good at practically disabling your PC on the basis that you (the user) might be a virus.

In reply to Andy Mountains:
I used to use AVG but then had an issue with it corrupting boot sectors (whatever they are) and was told/shown by a very trusted techi friend that is was all AVG's fault so I switched to using Avast. It has a few irritating features and does slow down you internet experience a bit but it seems to work of for the moment.

In reply to Andy Mountains: comodo is a very good one - doesn't seem to slow things down and is vert 'minimal'

In reply to Andy Mountains:

have a read of http://www.techsupportalert.com/pc/security-tools.html

In reply to Andy Mountains:

I'm what gets called a power user and have trialed all of the major players for lightweight presence Vs effectiveness.

I always land on the side of Avira's Antivir. There is a nag screen that can be annoying as it updates every day and then gives you said screen asking you to consider the full version, but that is worth suffering in favour of the level of security that you can set and how paranoid you want it to be.

Antivir watches for rootkits that are the most common infection these days. Most free antivirus software misses rootkits. I have seen rootkit infections on AVG, Avast, Comodo and MSE 'protected' machines.

You can get it here: http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus?x-origin=web and when installing should choose "custom" set up so that you get the full choices with regard to ahead heuristics and general level of paranoia.

Good luck.

In reply to Andy Mountains:

Linux Mint http://linuxmint.com/ is free, easy to use, and you'll never get a virus again.

In reply to Andy Mountains: Super Anti Spyware is amazing, must agree but, get linux, mint, ubuntu or kubuntu.

In reply to Andy Mountains:


If you have to use Windows, then I suggest that you use a web browser that allows you to block javascript unless you want it not to - and learn how to manage the blocking software - and also spend some time looking through all the options in your web browser so you understand them, and turn some features off.

Also learn to manage cookies, which is best done by automatically deleting probably at least 99% of them every time you shut your web browser down. I only keep cookies for sites I wish to remember my login for, such as ukclimbing. All others get deleted via one tick of a simple firefox preference.



I was amazed at how much un-neccessary and intrusive crap there is on some web-sites when I forgot that I'd disabled all my usual addons for a specific reason on my laptop at work, and then started browsing the web when I got back home.


Additionally, with emails, change the default headings that your mail client shows you. The default with most mail clients is to show you

From, Subject, Date

Adding a "To" and a "Reply-To" field makes it that much simpler to spot spam, and it's worth spending a bit of time working out how to make your mail client show the full headers, and also how to interpret them. An email that appears to come from your bank - for example - but has a Reply-To address of e45nbge @ yahoo.com.tw (or something similar) is not going to be genuine.



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