Avast may also not be able to remove some malware but other softwares can!
I would suggest better be smart not to get any virus!
When you get a virus sometimes it is trouble some!
Mike what do you mean by perfect?
Perfect means my machine has continued to run well since I started using Avast 18 months ago. The worst I have experienced is about one False Positive every six months.
you need to keep in mind that any antivirus can cover all and no AV can give you the 100% protection against virus, you must help your AV. To have a good AV does not mean you can visit all the bad sites, you have to be carefully, always.
Always create backup images. I don’t understand how anybody in this day and age can run a system without a good backup solution such as an imaging program. If something goes completely sideways on you such as a virus you can’t recover from it takes ten minutes(depends how much stuff you have installed) to reimage from a clean image and be up and running again. You also don’t have to worry about any trace of the virus still being there after a reimage. Peace of mind goes a long way. Of course if you have other internal drive(s), external drive(s) and or optical media that has an infection and it keeps hopping to your system drive that’s a different story. In that case I would reimage the system drive from a bootable CD, not boot back into the OS, and wipe or clean the offending drive(s) from outside of Windows. Or if you have clean images of the offending non system drive(s) reimage them as well. If it’s on a CD/DVD… destroy it as in break it in half and toss the pieces over your shoulder. Then I would boot back into that clean image.
If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.
If you have a back-up and recovery plan, you can recover from anything in minutes, not hours or days.
back-up all the things that you don’t want to lose, data files, like documents, spreadsheets, emails, email account details, registration keys, address book, favourites/bookmarks, downloaded files/programs, etc. the list goes on and on but if you don’t want to lose it back it up. There are many back-up programs that can simplify this task and run it every day.
Recovery - re-installing your system really is a poor choice and one of last resort. There are tools (Drive Imaging software) that take exact images of your Partitions or Hard Disks and these images can be restored in minutes if you suffer a major catastrophe and that doesn’t have to be a virus attack.
I do a weekly image of my partitions and save them to my 2nd hard disk, they can also be saved to off-line storage, DVD, USB external hard disk, etc. as part of my weekly system maintenance.
So if the worst comes to the worst at most I lose:
A. 6 days worth of program updates or new installations, but with my daily back-up I can recover most of that.
B. less than one days data files, emails, etc.
None of these is a problem and much quicker than a system reinstall and I don’t have to go on-line to download the myriad of security updates needed to secure my system where there is a chance to get reinfected whilst my system has vulnerabilities because of these missing patches. Not to mention all my system tweaks and program settings are retained and I will have saved myself many hours of work and a huge amount of stress.
Western Digital and Seagate both offer free versions of True Image now, so there’s really no excuse to not have some sort of imaging software installed. By the way I have used the WD True Image version and it works well, you can create bootable media in which you can backup and restore with it to and from USB drives, Firewire drives, network drives, etc…
Yes it’s a watered down version of True Image Home but it does everything most people would need it to do.