Anti-virus software recommendations

rooneypoo wrote:

SensFan71 wrote:

rooneypoo wrote:Solution: buy a Mac, and don't ever worry about anti-virus software ever again.

Seriously. That's what I did. I don't ever look back, either.

well you could do that, but a lot of us are afraid of change :^^^^:

Yes, but when the change is from a long cloudy week to a sunshiny day, or a long cold winter to hot summer day, you should welcome it.

Seriously, it's nice out here. Come try it. No anti-virus crap eating up RAM, no firewalls, no blue-screens-of-death, no freezing whatsoever.

Yes, I am a brand new Mac user. I never used one a day in my life before last week, and already it feels like home.

Glad to hear about your experience - I'm on the verge of making the switch (I have a home network with anywhere up to seven computers running at any one time, including at least one server - two adults and four kids). It will clearly be a gradual transition...

For those that were questioning whether it's worth switching due to the games, etc, check out this site: www.hackintosh.com If you are willing to to some tweaking (which I'm not), then it seems it's possible to get OS X running on relatively powerful PC hardware cheaper than what Apple sells. It is basically Linux, after all. This sort of high end hardware would make dual boot systems more tenable as PC game machines as well.

In terms of antivirus, I have been told by those more expert than me that it is worthwhile to have an antivirus installed on a Mac. The OS is converging with that of the iPod Touch and iPhone, and apparently that makes it more of a target for virus writers (no, I have no idea how this makes a difference; I always thought that the iPod/iPhone OS were just slimmed down versions of OS X already)

Finally, in terms of cost, everyone that I have spoken to (I avoid the "Mac fanboi" type) has proven to me time and time again that the long-term cost of ownership is actually lower. I have colleagues that have MacBooks from 2003 that still run well, and are still usable. I'd challenge anyone to find a PC laptop in the same price category (in 2003) that would even be tolerable now. Most that I have had last about two years.

That's my 2 cents.

Did something recently change with Avast? I installed it on my desktop a couple months ago and it's been running mostly transparently ever since then (with one sort-of interesting exception*).

A little while later I installed it on my son's laptop. Now, this one recently turned itself off and insists that I register it -- I need a license key to turn it back on. The license key is free for the personal use home edition, but it will need to be renewed yearly. Also the registration key is not getting here in any hurry whatsoever -- I've been waiting about 10 minutes already, and the instructions only say "within 24 hours".

Now here's the interesting part -- both are version 4.8 Home edition. It's possible that I haven't rebooted my desktop in a while so it continues running while it's still resident, and if I reboot now it will shut down just like the one on my son's laptop. It's also possible that it behaves differently with Vista versus XP. Not all that important, really, but I hate not knowing.

* The one quirky thing Avast did was tag "Plant Tycoon.exe" as a worm. Plant Tycoon is just some game one of my kids downloaded -- probably just a demo version, and who knows, maybe Avast confuses nagware with worms? The *really weird* thins is my kid claims he downloaded it "like two years ago" (he exaggerates, but it's still likely to have been quite a while ago) and has not used it "like for ever".

So, why did Avast all of a sudden (it seems) find something suspicious about it?

My wife's Mom's Avast installation (which I did) had the same thing happen the other day with the license. Not sure why, but I had her request a new one and when it arrived, she entered it and all was fine. Not sure what was up with that.

Give the email some time.