Virus Solutions

This is probably the hardest thing to write about as virus solutions come in many flavours from many vendors. I've personally gone from Dr Solomon's, to Norton, then Panda and ending up with the now out of favour AVG.

Norton and Panda just got to bloated trying to do everything and caused quite a lot of problems for our clients, I tried Kaspersky but it gave problems just trying to install it. AVG installed an did the job? with very little problems.

When a virus or trojan has managed to install on a computer, it's usually because the person using the computer is logged in with administrator rights, and it's not always the end users fault, it's the company that supplied the total solution, who couldn't make the effort to set up user accounts or in some cases their software doesn't work properly when logged in as a user, as they haven't set the rights to the directories, files or registry to allow users to function correctly with their software. Microsoft Office 2000 wasn't to brilliant at installing for a user, but there where work arounds (have the user setup with administrator rights and the CD in drive until all updates, and settings are carried out, then set back as user).

So from just a virus scanner, to virus and spyware scanner to virus, spyware and spam, to the Internet suite of virus, spyware, spam, firewal and parental control. The latter have had a tendancy to take a lot of memory and slow the computer, fortunately there are still suppliers of a virus scanner only solution, and most of the big names that went to a one stop (Intenet security) solution, now have virus only available again. A Sunbelt Software survey of professional support staff indicated that 65% of them preferred the stand alone solution, and you can count us in as well.

Currently there are quite a few stand alone virus products, and it's suggested that the companies that had the bloatware (all in one solution) have improved there products so they aren't so heavy on resources now. Ultimately you will have to give some of them a try and find out which one's you are comfortable with.

I'm still using the out of favour AVG and with an out of favour ZoneAlarm for my personal firewall, with Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 2007 as a spyware checker, and a Smoothwall Express 3.0 firewall, Oh and there's a firewall in my modem/router.

I've have only made one mistake, which ZoneAlarm picked up. This was a spam email that had a program that offered to track your mobile, Curious I loaded it, ran it and put my mobile number in, then nothing. Then scanned with Panda at the time with spyware checkers, found nothing. Two weeks later an unknown program tried to access the internet, ZoneAlarm obviously popped up and asked what I wanted to do. I denied access, scanned for virus and spyware, nothing again. Found the program, sent it off to Panda who came back with an update to scan for it the next day, and said it was a trojan.

Now I have AVG installed and use Panda's active scan for a second opinion occasionally.

We still have clients with a similar configuration and the majority have ethernet connections to there modem as well to reduce hacking problems.