Antivirus for Win7

well sorry to say but i dont use a keygen on my avast, which means the one im giving to dave was a serial licensed under me and its a corporate serial though I just want dave to have it so he can try Avast pro... by the way avast is blocking all those keygen generated serials now.. yeah when it comes to that i rather use avira than using an avast pro with a keygen.

I decided to give Avira a try since so many people have good things to say about it, but after installing and setting up I get to the scanning for updates part and it hangs. I've let it go for 10 minutes and it still says Transmitted: 0 kBytes. Anyone have any idea what could be the issue? I left all settings at the default.

Hmm....that's odd. I used to get that problem every now and then in the 2008 software, but it went away with the 2009 version. What version of the software do you have and what verion of windows are you running?

Windows _______ __bit?

Also, is it with a full system scan? If so, How many HD do you have?....partitions

Sorry, I shouldn't have used the phrase "scanning for updates"; that's just what the status window said. I didn't have a problem with scanning for viruses, it was with updating the definition file. I just found where to manually download the file and install it, so I'm good now. I'll just have to remember to do that if the automatic update isn't going to work.

the automatic update should work

Make sure your firewall is letting it through.

I build, repair, reprogram, flush, restructure registries, clear viral trees and root kits all the time on computers... I use AVG Free. It's just enough, if you're not retarded (which you aren't) then you don't need much more than that. IMO AVG Free is the best free program. No BS required for DL or install.

I use it on my computers and all computers I repair/build/etc and I HAVE used other programs (norton, mcafee, etc)

After I manually installed the first update for Avira, it can now successfully update itself. I have no idea what the problem was.

Monco said:

I build, repair, reprogram, flush, restructure registries, clear viral trees and root kits all the time on computers... I use AVG Free. It's just enough, if you're not retarded (which you aren't) then you don't need much more than that. IMO AVG Free is the best free program. No BS required for DL or install.

I use it on my computers and all computers I repair/build/etc and I HAVE used other programs (norton, mcafee, etc)

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Still trying to fix the rep, but it wont let me do it yet. I didnt forget.

Tech_Junkie said:

Still trying to fix the rep, but it wont let me do it yet. I didnt forget.

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don't worry about it too much, i'm not one to hold a grudge no worries dude

besides... i already sold that laser and bought a 407mW 8x bdr-203 in a pocket mini from ndrew2505

Oh you gots Drew's bad boy!!! Nice buy, that thing's sick. I'm glad you sold your other laser.

I'm reviving this dead thread, which has been answered long ago, only to mention that I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials for a little while now, and I have to say I'm really quite impressed.

I had really low hopes for any antivirus product made by MS, but I'm honestly blown away by how well MSSE performs. It's really light weight, it has an idiotproof interface, and so far it's been leaps and bounds better at detecting "fake antivirus" programs than any other tool. No other antivirus product I've tried has detected the packed installers for these fake AV programs. Out of the last 4 fakeav installers I've sent to virustotal.com, MSSE was the *only* program that detected *any* of them.

Best of all, it's completely free, for anyone who has a genuine copy of Windows. Only problem I have with it so far is that it gets its antivirus definitions through windows update, so if you normally have windowsupdate turned off, it'll turn it back on and set it to auto.

Whats a fake AV program???

Tech_Junkie said:

Whats a fake AV program???

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The vast majority of "viruses" these days consist of fake antivirus programs that install themselves then pop up all the time telling you you have x thousand viruses and that your antivirus program is out of date.. To remove all these thousands of "viruses" you need to pay them $59.95 to get a registered copy of their "antivirus" program. It basically amounts to blackmailing the stupid, yet I've seen more than one person fall for it. I've emphasized to them how bad of a mistake they've made and that they should change all their bank accounts immediately.

Do a google search for "antivirus 2009" or "personal antivirus" to find out more about these programs, but basically what they do is set up a domain name, inject a lot of popular keywords into their site, then have their webpage set up to look like an explorer "my computer" window that pops up saying "You may be infected! Click here to disinfect", which triggers a download of an installer for their virus. When you install it, it usually changes your wallpaper to say "YOU'RE COMPTUER ARE INFECTED!! MANY VIRUS ARE BEEN DETECTED!! IMPROVEV YOU'RE PROTECTION BY REGITSTRING YOU'RE ANTI=VIRUS" then it constantly pops up "windows security center" messages telling you you need to pay them money, and they offer no way of closing the window or uninstalling the program. They're usually pretty easy to get rid of if you know what you're doing, but out of the last couple hundred virus infections I've gotten rid of over the last 2 years, 99% of them have been these fake antivirus programs.

Interesting fact: Most of these come from Russia. The RBN is a well known cybercrime syndicate that owns hundreds of botnets and distributes thousands of different pieces of malware. They have political ties to the Russian government, and have pretty much immunity to do whatever they want. Someone hacked one of their servers and found their profits from running one of these fake antivirus scams total several million dollars per month. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Business_Network
Most of the sites I've seen distributing these things have domain names that are a string of 10 random characters on a .cn domain. I've found them several times while searching for pretty mundane things, such as "price of gold per pound" etc. The day google celebrated the barcode and changed their logo to a barcode, my boss found one as the top google result for "why is google a barcode today".

true that and with experience in the it department that was the main thing that hit our teachers..... the one program i found helpful was malware bytes

Hmm never seen a fake AV before.