[fingofongo]

Hi

I just set up windows xp on my MBP today so that I can play some computer games. Now that I'm exposed to the world of viruses and malicious spyware, does anyone know of a good antivirus program, preferably free? I think on my old pc i used NOD32, but I think you have to pay for that now.

THanks

[QuantaCat]

NOD32 and Kaspersky Antivirus. Those are the best.

[AussieMacGamer]

AVG Antivirus Free Edition. I use it and it works... Common sense also helps... i dont have much of that though.

[Drizzt]

For free AV there is the already mentioned AVG, though I must admit I have a sort of aversion to it after my work PC got something that caused it to continuously reboot upon bootup, and AVG didn't see a darn thing wrong. Other free AV solutions are: Avira AntiVir, and Avast

Be warned that Avira will show you ads for its own products when updating its definitions and such, but I didn't find that to be a big bother on my work PC.

You'll also want some anti-spyware protection as well. For that the free options are: Spybot S&D, aSquared, SuperAntiSpyware, Spyware Blaster

I recommend getting all of those anti spyware options since
1. They're all free
2. They all have different detection rates

IMO, you can never be too careful in regards to how much protection software you install (or at least scanner software only, real time protection is a different issue). Common sense is the best prevention, but nobody's perfect, and you never know if say aSquared would be able to save your system from some nasty spyware that the other two may not catch.

That said, I ended up paying for a commercial AV (NOD32) and antispyware (CounterSpy) and I've been pleased by both. It cost me a total of $60 for a year of support between the two of them, which I don't consider too bad at all considering other suites usually charge that much or more for their stuff.

[Silver Samurai]

Kapersky and McAffee are good.
I have McAffee (free from my school) and have no complaints about it.
Norton is horrible though. But I can only speak based on my experiences.

[AussieMacGamer]

Were supposed to have antivirus on our macs at school so the PC's don't get anything... no one does it anyways.

[QuantaCat]

AdAware is a good spyware blaster too.

[AussieMacGamer]

Yeah i used to use adaware too. AVGfree comes with spyware protection built in now too.

[Dark_Archon]

I vote be careful with what you do, and reformat if something happens instead of installing all that bloatware. It just doesn't make sense to slow the computer down 100% of the time when it isn't used for "mission critical" stuff, and at most, it could only happen .000000001% of the time. I've never had a virus problem or a spyware problem... of course I do nothing with Windows except play games. If something happens, I'll just reinstall Windows.

[fingofongo]

Hey thanks for all the good suggestions
Yeah I probably won't be doing much with XP except gaming, so I think I'll just get one antivirus program and one antispyware program.

Thanks!

[Drizzt]

Dark_Archon, on April 28th 2008, 07:36 PM, said:

I vote be careful with what you do, and reformat if something happens instead of installing all that bloatware. It just doesn't make sense to slow the computer down 100% of the time when it isn't used for "mission critical" stuff, and at most, it could only happen .000000001% of the time. I've never had a virus problem or a spyware problem... of course I do nothing with Windows except play games. If something happens, I'll just reinstall Windows.

For dual booting on a Mac, that will probably make do, since you're not likely spending as much time doing anything else. My advice came from the perspective of having a separate PC, which I do, as well as generally safe practices from all the research I've done on anti virus and anti spyware options available on the PC. I decided to play it safe with the purchase of two programs since the thought of reinstalling over 15gb of games as well as Windows was not an appealing one. Out of all of the free software I listed, only AntiVir or Avast run in real time (i.e. always using a bit of memory and processor power), the rest of those programs are all on demand scanners and only consume any computing resources when they're launched and run (SuperAntiSpyware can be set to launch with Windows, however this is useless and can be turned off right away).

The reason why I got NOD32 and CounterSpy were because out of all of the paid programs available, they have the smallest impact on overall system performance, although CounterSpy is definitely slower than NOD32 which you practically don't even see any difference at all that its there. However, CounterSpy is still leaps and bounds better than Spyware Doctor or Webroot SpySweeper which I've read so many nightmare reviews on, they made Microsoft products look good!

[Cobra]

QuantaCat, on April 26th 2008, 05:04 PM, said:

NOD32 and Kaspersky Antivirus. Those are the best.

Those two probably get my vote, but if your a fanatic for Security F-Secure Internet Security. Even the best and up-to-date antivirus program can't stop every virus though. Despite NOD32 being my favourite antivirus solution I still had my PC become overwhelmed with a explosion of viruses while using it. Stupid thing disguised itself as a Windows auto update icon in my systray, clicked on it and BOOM!

Use OS X for anything to do with the web, and XP just for games and you'll be pretty safe. That way you'll have to be unlucky enough for a game disc to have a virus, and that is pretty unlucky. Just don't use any Sony music CDs from 2005