Need a good non-western (USA/Europe) based Anti-malware.

[Vagrant0]

Though tbh, if a virus has spread enough to reach your pc, then chances are it wont make any difference where the virus scanner you use came from anymore anyway.

While normally true, I do occasionally try to go browsing off the beaten path just to see what's there. More recently, I tried tracking down the remnants of the Japanese/Chinese Oblivion modding community, and had, in the process hit a few dead ends and bad links as a result of my limited (non-existent) reading ability of those languages. I also heard some things about how the US government has been using similar processes to malware to track what people are doing online, and that most anti-malware companies have to purposely ignore those processes as a requirement for being marketed in the country. While this is likely the paranoid ramblings of someone who bought way too many copies of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, I figured I might as well try to kill 2 birds with one stone just in case there was any validity to this, and in case there was any reason why the man would have me under surveillance. Not that I'm involved with anything unlawful mind you, but you never know just how bored big brother might be, or how far they might lead some future bit of satyric rhetoric.

 

But mostly it's because it would be a program which works off an entirely different database than what the main 3 work from, so would have a greater chance of catching things which others would miss. There are also pieces of malware which are designed specifically to work around the heuristics of those mainstream programs, so by using something totally unusual, the chances of anything being designed to go around those methods would likely get caught. And, people in those countries obviously have their own programs which are designed to keep them safe from viruses, so those kinds of programs should exist in those countries, atleast in theory. I just find it a bit hard to believe that people using computers in countries like India, China, Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Israel, and other non-westernized, or marginally westernized countries which have a significant online population are using Norton, Kaspersky, and the like. But that may just be my own biases.

 

At any rate, Avast seemed to have found what was seemingly causing the problems, I'm not not too thrilled about having yet another security program running in the background.

[Vagrant0]

Removed Avast, just too many issues between blocking sites I normally use, and it always calling home or relaying information through p2p. I need a program which prevents things from connecting when I don't want them to, and keeps me from having things which might cause harm to my system, not another program that needs to check for updates every 5 seconds, ends up requiring more resources, and can't be terminated through the task manager.

[LHammonds]

Once you get things sorted out, give this a try to KEEP from getting infected when browsing sites: http://www.sandboxie.com/

 

If you PC is sluggish, that typically means "something" is taking away from your CPU. Use Task Manager to view and sort by processes taking up CPU time. Trackdown unfamiliar process to find the problem. If they are common "service host" processes, check out what services are installed and running (other than the default that comes with windows).

 

LHammonds

[Vagrant0]

Welp, Kaspersky is out.

 

Durring an update it seems to shut down all protection, demand all bandwidth that my internet connection provides, and require 100% of what my 2.4gb processor can manage. As I was in the middle of using a fullscreen application when this happened, the update got corrupted, resulting in a program that started up after being forced to reboot from switching off the power at the source, booted up immediately upon restart, and continued to use 100% processing. After which I could no longer update the program since the program itself was too busy doing whatever the hell it was supposed to be doing. I let it sit after reboot for 1 hour with no change, no improvement. Spent another hour looking through their knowledge base to solve the problem, or atleast revert to a working version. Upon finally finding out how to fix the program, and going through the re-installation procedure, upon rebooting I was presented with a manditory request to send them information about the nature of the program failing. None of the buttons to cancel this procedure worked, so I shrugged and went to send them what I thought was just a normal report. What it turned out to be was a good 500mb of data which was accumulated durring that hour that I let it do its thing. AND as there is no way to cancel the sending of this report once started, I had to shut down the computer again, and uninstall the program as quickly as possible.

 

Although people may swear by this program, and although it might provide some better coverage, 4 hours of my life trying to resolve issues that resulted from a bad update is just inexcusable. A program that suspends all protection while updating, demands 100% of your connection and processing while it updates, and does all of this automatically, is just too disruptive. I'm aware that there is an option for manual updates, but one would have thought that updating something like a anti-virus which is so highly spoken of, would be a bit less demanding.

 

This whole incident reminds me too much of the days when windows would try to start defragging automatically if your fragmentation was too high. It didn't care what else you were doing, it just went and did it, and usually ended up forcing you to completely stop whatever it was that you were doing, and still screwing up things worse than they were before. Things should only work when you want them to work, or when nothing else is working that might interfere with their operation.

 

I'm mostly just letting off some steam here, but since it was so recommended, I thought it might be worth mentioning my experiences with the program. Thankfully, the license was one of the 3 which an associate gave to me, and not something that I purchased myself, or else I would be really upset over having thrown away $90 for the program. Oddly enough, for the 10 hours or so that the program did work, no viruses were detected durring a full scan, so I have to be doing something right.