I’m curious. Upon installation of avast 5.0, DID it find any genuine Viruses in any of you all’s computers that avast 4.8 had NOT previously found?
In my little over 2 years of being on avast, I have yet to get a genuine Virus. I have only encountered 4 False Positives. Neither SAS nor MBAM have found any Malware on my computer either. So, I do wonder from time to time whether my computer is REALLY definitively Virus / Malware Free … or whether some other Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware products would find something.
So yeah, I do wonder whether when I do finally install avast 5.0 … WILL it, with its beefed up, turbo-charged arsenal, FIND something avast 4.8 hadn’t previously found.
Well avast 4.8 found a virus in a pst file that i had backed up from work which doesnt surprise me as we were forced to use a severly outdated symantec AV. Upon installing Avast 5 i ran the full system scan and it came up clean. I tried to scan the file, and it does, but it doesnt seem to know how to unpack the file to scan the contents of it like it is supposed to do. Is there anyway to force avast to scan the contents of a pst file like 4.8 could do, or is this just a little bug i found?
@ Chim: this has nothing to do with avast 4 or 5, but your browsing habits If you’re browsing safely, chances are minimal that your system will ever get infected. Mine got infected once in 12 years,and that was minimal, an activeX in IE. So no your system isn’t safer than others, it’s your browsing that protects you … as to V5 vs V4 detection rate, V5 might be better due to better heuristic management, but again, you might never get to see this difference if you keep browsing the way you do.
Chim, the best Anti Virus is still our brains. AVs like Avast are just tools. In the end, it is still how we use the PC. I have been virus free for years on end also. Be happy. You don’t have headaches like most people do about viruses.
It’s that I compare my 2 plus years of avast usage with my similar timespan usage of McAfee before avast. In that same similar timespan of McAfee use, I did encounter several Alerts of Viruses, Trojans, Etc. Heck, after some of those encounters, I would even end up performing Windows Reinstalls because it would turn out that the alleged Virus / Trojan couldn’t be cleaned, quarantined or deleted.
Of course, back then, in the early 2000’s, I didn’t know about False Positives. I just took McAfee at its word. If McAfee alerted me that it had encountered a Virus / Trojan … no matter whether it managed to block it, clean it, delete it … or NOT be able to get rid of it, I just ASSUMED it was the real deal.
But, NOW … in my wiser years ;D I know about False Positives and that an Alert does NOT mean you have encountered a 100% genuine, without a shadow of a doubt Virus. So, there’s obviously no way of telling how many, IF ANY of those McAfee Virus / Trojan Buffet Alert entrees back then were genuine.
I think with that logic, the odds are that most of those McAfee Alerts must have been False Positives. I say that because from what I read on the Forums here, people who encounter genuine, MAJOR Viruses … they’ll KNOW about it. Usually there’ll be some serious effect on System Performance / Operation. With my McAfee Virus Alerts back then, I don’t think I ever saw any effect on my System’s Performance. It was more just a case of a mild panic because, “OMG! My system has a Virus!” :o
4.8 is better than 5.0 at this time, 4.8 pro is a bulldozer can install in safe mode on a system with rootkits and remove them as 5.0 acts like the rest and will not install.
Add me to those who hasn’t seen a virus warning in years, real or FP. My ISP has done an excellent job of intercepting and quarantining anything in the mail, to the point where I’ve got no idea whether avast would have caught them (although I naturally trust that it would have). The last real virus I encountered (they didn’t tell me what it was) was about three computers back, one of the kind that could do hardware damage and according to the shop “burned out” my mobo.
I think there’s general agreement that common-sense browsing is one of the most powerful defenses we have. Sure, there’s 2 or 3 “adult” sites I visit fairly regularly, but the operators there must be pretty meticulous about making sure their sites stay safe. I did get a warning once while at one of them from Spyware Guard, indicating there was an attempt to change my home page (normally about:blank), but everything scanned clean and I suspect in hindsight I’d probably done it myself by accidentally hitting the “make this your home page” link (or maybe keyboard shortcut).
So the most serious “threat” I’ve seen in ages is no worse than adware – my ISP catches about 95 percent of that, and my mailers (formerly Eudora, now Thunderbird) catch almost all the rest.
(Edit, quite a bit later) That real virus I mentioned in the first paragraph was long enough ago that it was before I started relying on avast (or any other resident protection) – probably back in Win 3.1 days, and quite possible even before I first got internet access.
If you’re browsing safely, chances are minimal that your system will ever get infected. Mine got infected once in 12 years,and that was minimal, an activeX in IE. So no your system isn’t safer than others, it’s your browsing that protects you 
… as to V5 vs V4 detection rate, V5 might be better due to better heuristic management, but again, you might never get to see this difference if you keep browsing the way you do.