What are your favorite anit-malware programs? ( Archived) (7)

I use AVG

I used free AVAst for couple of years.
I've used paid AVAST on 3 PCs for 3 years now.

Well one of the important things to note is different anti-malware programs look for different things, AND they have different techniques of search. What this means is sometimes a good program will miss finding a malware (or a key part of a malware) but another program may find it.

We also need to separate out the fact that not all anti virus programs will pick up on rootkits or spyware. Some of them will pick up some indicators of rootkits and spyware, but not all of them. The reverse is true. A program designed primarily to detect and kill spyware, such as Windows Defender, sometimes misses rootkits or virus indicators.

You should only have one anti-virus program running in your systems memory at a time. If you try to have two doing the same task at the same time they can conflict with each other, or spend their days alerting to each others databases of virus identification codes.

Free AVG picks up viruses, but as recently as today I had it miss a Trojan, and I have seen it slide by some spywares. Alternatively Super Anti-spyware (SAS) picks up most spyware but misses some Trojans and some viruses. I use both. Run one after the other. It isn't unusual for one to pick up an indicator of something the other one missed. The question of which one is run first isn't important. The point is they use different search techniques and since each companies product is proprietary they use different databases for reference.

TDSSKiller (which is free) excels at finding hidden root kits.

I have had mixed results with McAfee online scan. Last week I de-bugged a friend's Windows 7 laptop which was supposedly protected against viruses with a paid Symantec account. Mcafee said it was clean too. However the laptop refused to update Windows and had last done so in 2013. Twice in recent weeks the owner had experienced the blue screen of death. The error codes from Windows Update translated to probable Malware. TDSSKiller found a hidden rootkit (and killed it) about 6 Gigabytes in size. It was learned the Norton had been corrupted by the Malware and therefore saw nothing wrong in the machine. SAS found (and removed) numerous pieces of spyware. Then after reboot only then did the machine start accepting Windows Update. MS Anti-Malware progam then found and killed another malware (later identified as a key-logger type). Uninstalling the Norton I installed free AVG 2015 after a reboot and it quickly found more viruses (and quarantined/killed them). Rebooted CCleaner erased the un ubbeded files and took out many registry errors the malware had caused. AVG was deleted and ReImage (a paid program) restored the 7 registry to factory specs. Again MS Update was run and about 300 important updates were made without problem. Rebooted again Norton Symantec was reinstalled. Then it updated and a defrag of the cleaned hard drive was done as well as another scan. Then a scandisk with no more problems found. The machine was returned to the owner and she reports it works perfectly.