Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

The list of “compatible” antivirus programs for Windows 7 is short – Norton, Kaspersky, Avira, and AVG. I tried Kaspersky 8 Beta first, but after a couple of weeks I’ve determined that it’s just too bulky and “obtrusive” and has some issues that I’m not happy about.  Recently I uninstalled this (thankfully, the uninstall was very clean and left no traces) and tried AVG Free. AVG free boasts some 80 million users, is MUCH more lightweight, and at this point this is the one I recommend for Windows 7. For a “free” version – this thing has way more features than you’d expect. Since my Avast! license recently expired on my main development machine that runs Windows Vista x64, I installed AVG Free on that too. It found and eliminated nearly half a dozen known threats that Avast! never was able to find.  The only option that is disabled that I could find on AVG Free was the rootkit scan. F-Secure has a free FSBL.EXE scanner to take care of that, so the “free” antivirus option i...

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off. - Johnny Carson I don't catch many viruses; on the rare occasion that I errantly click on some unknown executable, Avast jumps up and bellows. But today, I made a boo-boo and watched in horror as my friends, the two Avast bluecons in the notification area, silently disappeared! You might be saying to yourself, "Uh-Oh..." - and you'd be right. There are more than 188 variations of the Bagle virus loose on the Internet. The latest variations pack the means to hide new kinds of nastiness inside your computer, and current antivirus software cannot save you . In fact, not only does this little booger jump out from it's invisible rootkit and whisk away the Avast service executables before they can even be started during an installation, it also disables the Windows Defender service, among other anti-spyware and antivirus installations. That is correct. Traditional antivirus sof...