simple question

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

i love avast pro but seems like when everyone has a problem make sure you scan with a-square or ewido…i took off a-squared free off my computer today because it was giving out tons of false positives… …are there any other programs out there that are good…i have the retail version of spy sweeper and ad-aware se plus…isn’t that good enough along with the best anti-virus program ???

2

:slight_smile: Hi Drhayden :

  The "regular" Posters on this forum recommend A-squared
  ONLY when your Operating System is NOT Win XP or
   Win 2000 .
   Would recommend you check out the info in
   "Newbie and Oldie's list " at :
   http://members.accessbee.com/mitch/phantomPhixer.html .
3

If as Spiritsongs said you have XP, Ewido is the tool of choice over a-squared. Of late there have been a spate of false positives from a-squared. The main thing is that you don’t take what it (or other security software) at face value, don’t delete, backup/quarantine and check, check, check.

SpySweeper and Adaware are looking for specific areas of infection Ewido is a malware suite and is very good at finding and removing trojans, something that the other two aren’t as good at.

I only run ewido once a week just before I do my avast local disks scan, as a part of my regular weekly maintenance.

4

I am on XP and have used a-2 and Ewido together for a very long time.

I agree in that Ewido is the best one of the two, but IMO 2 is better than 1
in this case.

The last round of false positives from a-2 was heavy, but just ignore them.
If you don’t like seeing them go into the a-2 folder and remove the new or newest signatures. They will be replaced by a-2 with the next update anyway.
They usually get fixed very quickly.

I can’t see any drawbacks by having both of them. A-2 might catch something that Ewido misses.

But I fully realize that this behaviour by a-2 is dangerous if a newbie goes on and deletes the false positives.

5

drhayden1,

The difference is that SpySweeper, Ad-Aware, Spybot, SpywareBlaster, etc concentrate mostly on ad & spy malware. Ewido and a-squared concentrate mostly on worms & trojans. And, of course, you know Avast concentrates mostly on viruses (virii).

Yes, each of these may also pick-up items normally found by the others. This is because sometimes there is a fine line between what is adware, spyware, worms, trojans, and viruses (virii). Some of this malware can even be concided to be 2 or 3 classifications because of what is included in the malware program.

I hope this helps you. :slight_smile: