Virus protection, etc.

[Xander]

Sorry, I'm full of questions today.. At the moment I have AVG free on my home computer.. I also run adaware and spybot search and destroy. I run these every few days and they always pick up something. I have windows firewall on I think.

I dont mind paying for stuff if I should have better than what I currently have? I dont really have any problems but i feel like my computer gets slowwww sometimes, maybe cos of this (it sometimes seems a lot better after getting rid of the spybot things) and Im not sure if Im protecting it well enough. Or if I should pay for some virus/firewall type thing.

[Dr Unne]

I think AVG is as good as anything you buy. Norton for example is a huge bloated mess of a program and you will likely experience much greater speed issues with it than with anything you run now. You also need to keep paying for such programs indefinitely to keep your virus lists up to date, which I don't like.

Software firewalls are generally not very good in my experience. If possible, a hardware firewall is the way to go. Most cheap home routers also act as firewalls. A firewall will only protect you from worms that crawl the internet looking for vulnerable services listening on certain ports. It does nothing to protect you from downloading a virus yourself though.

The best protection from viruses is to alter user behavior. In the end, no software solution is ever going to be nearly adequate. Once you have a virus, you're already screwed; getting a program to try to clean up the mess is just slapping a band-aid over the problem.

Get a firewall to save you from the net-crawling worms; then don't download evil or untrusted things, don't run things that come as attachments in emails, use Firefox instead of IE and use something other than Outlook/Outlook Express for email, and you will be as well-off as you can reasonably expect if you run Windows.

[crono_logical]

If they always pick up something every few days when you run them, and the computer seems slow every now and then, then I think it's already too late for your machine and it's time to reformat If it was really cleaning them up, you shouldn't be seeing the same infection again and again

Do as Unne said (best on a clean computer) - prevention is the only cure these days really, since the effort to clean up properly now is far greater than to reinstall

[Rostum]

Norton kind of sucks, imo. It doesn't tell you what it's doing, and when it's updating it slows my connection down a great deal and I don't know why (I have a 1.5mbps connection).

[ValiantKnight]

Don't be incredibly alarmed though about a spyware product picking up something every day.

Most antispyware products pick up cookies in their scans. Any day you browse the internet with any browser remotely configured to accept cookies(which are no instantly evil), you will see cookies on your spyware scans. These are nothing to be alarmed about as far as infection/damage goes. They merely report what you did to a website so it can give you more ads... /sighs.
But its not anything bad.
However if you are picking up something more than cookies, then yes something may be wrong.

A hardware firewall will do wonders... some of the good software firewalls will also do wonders, the ones with as little preconfiguring as possible, and makes you do all the work... but those are the most annoying also.

Most of what Unne suggested I would repeat...

Hardware Router/firewall
Software Firewall
Microsoft Updates up to date fully
A free antivirus(AVG/Avast)
Two free antispyware(Ewido(AVG)/Adaware)
Using Firefox instead of IE
Installing NoScript into Firefox(highly annoying but more protection)
Using something other than Outlook(/shame.. I still use outlook)

[o_O]

Your best protection is <strike>common sense</strike> Linux.

I don't believe that antivirus or anti-spyware software can truly provide protection, and as such, I haven't used any in the last five or so years, and haven't had one virus (that caused noticeable activity - without the software, you don't know about infections ). If you're careful about what you download and install, you're mostly safe. Realistically, nobody cares about "hacking your mainframes", as software firewalls would have you believe - the only point of concern for me (if I used Windows) would be questionable applets or ActiveX controls running on a webserver, that could install bad stuff when you're not looking. But you have browser-specific settings to prevent that if you think there's enough concern.