I wanted to clear up some information flying around yahoo answers posted by the Norton, McAfee, Avast!, Avira, Bitdefender, etc… virus software fanboys. (come on people! being a fanboy of Virus software is just sad!)
Contrary to what the fanboys want you to believe, AVG does not work on file names alone. It works on virus signatures and heuristics just like every other anti virus product out there, so stop claiming that AVG falsely detects major OS components as infected, this is just a complete lie. If your AVG install IS detecting major OS components as infected then you are either using a pirated windows copy or you have gotten a serious infection.
Resource usage is actually very satisfactory compared to other offerings; especially the common ones like Norton and McAfee! Even if you compare to the other free offerings like Avira and Avast which both use roughly 80MB of system memory with "minimal" installation options, AVG free installed with minimal options still beats them out since it only uses roughly 25MB.
As for detections, they could be better. But you can’t expect it to be as good as the subscription Nod32 or Eset Smart Scan for the detections over resource usage and AVG is pretty competitivewith other free solutions in this area.
Remember, you cannot simply install an anti virus program on a Windows system and always expect it to come back 100% clean, no matter what brand you use, NO anti-malware packages can make that claim.
I will admit that now that they’ve started using pop-up ad screens like Avira, I will probably switch for the better detection rates since the only thing keeping me from switching to Avira in the first place was all their ads.
Anyway, let me know what you think.
LOL already the fanbois come out in droves!
AVG was made to detect the EICAR only in certain formats on purpose. Grisoft did want a method to recieve the file for file based tests that are also needed so they don’t detect it in every format. Every company chooses how they will detect this.. originally they detected it in most all formats but found then that people couldn’t get a copy to test other areas with.
All Eicar effectively does is show that the resident sheild is up, it does nothing to prove the effectiveness of the antivirus since all antivirus programs can easily be programmed to detect it since it is always the same string of data!
Thanks for the link to elitekiller.com for the disabling of the Avira nag screens though!
Meh, the lack or inclusion of root-kit detection doesnt bother me much.
Why?
The problem with root-kits is that once a virus injects a root-kit into your OS kernel it is next to undetectable, so if it doesn’t stop the virus it won’t detect the root-kit.
It gets even worse if you take hyper-visor root-kits into consideration.
Prove to me that this is not the case and I will change my mind.
