I gave up on NAV after it missed 6 viruses on my hard drive.
I tested BitDefender 7 and it won’t work well with my wireless home network.
I installed avast! 4 Pro yesterday and everything seems to work OK. BUT – I tried to scan all the files on my hard drive and it scanned a total of about 190,000. With NAV, the full scan was something around 560,000. And the full scan with BitDefender scanned over 1,000,000.
Why the big differences?? How can I get avast to scan ALL the files on my hard drive?
To be honest – I’m having a hard time figuring out how to set which files I’m supposed to be scanning.
I thought I had selected all of the “Packers” under the “task” for scanning all local drives?
Is that the setting I needed? I have to say the avast skin/interface looks very nice, but I’m not having a lot of luck figuring out the settings and how to set them? Sorry.
Well, I thought when I was using the enhanced interface that I had checked archives – but maybe not.
I switched to the simpler enterface, set the options to “Thorough” scan and checked to scan archives.
Worked fine. Only one question: The report I got said there were a number of files unable to scan, because they were “password protected.” Turns out most of them were Norton SystemWorks “protected” files in the recycler. Got rid of those.
Why won’t avast scan “protected” files? Is that a problem?
BTW – Thanks to all for welcoming me to the forum. I love this product already and expect to purchase avast Pro in the next couple of weeks. So I’ll probably be hanging around here from time to time.
(Hi, Eric. Good to see you from the PocoMail forums ;D)
And while I’m mentioning PocoMail: I figured out how to run PocoMail with Popfile spam software AND avast Pro. Seems to be a great combination for us email freaks.
Thats why password protected archives are good for transporting viral files
Each password protected archive could be brute-forced and scanned after password found,but this procedure takes time and lots of CPU time. And why the hell would you need such function
I’ve heard that some of the latest viruses (was it some variant of Beagle or Netsky?) actually sends itself in a passport-protected ZIP add tells the password in the message body. Ie. if the user is devoted enough, he/she can extract the virus and run it (provided there’s no file-system based on-access scanner installed on his/her machine).
Yes, latest Beagle variants really spread themselves as password-protected ZIP files - and append the (random) archive password to the message (so that the user can extract it).
Hi Lars-Erik, Hi Gary,
;D Some jokes are fine, but in reality it happens all to often.
Out of ignorance and stupidity they open every attachment which gets into their inbox.
Afterwards it supprises them that their computer got infected, because they didn’t have the good sense to install a virusscanner as well as a firewall.
Students are worse in exchanging software without scanning it.
Some spammers already send you viruses. >:( Totally unacceptable.
Gary, I’m really glad of having Avast Pro instead of NAV and using PocoMail instead of MS. In addition I also have Sygate Pro, so this all together gives me a 99% protection.
Computer company people are no better. I work in a large software company and there are ALWAYS someone that manages to open an infected attachment (and one is enough). Luckily the virus scanners get 99.9% nowadays, but from time to time a new virus gets passed, and then…
Could it be that many of us are sort of morbidly fascinated by the whole idea of
email attachments/virus infections? Sort of like car wrecks and train wrecks – you know it’s tragedy, but it’s hard not to look. ???
Eric
