Post by DavidKPost by Steve HaguePost by Sid NunciusI'm getting back to normal after the Great Laptop Catastrophe[1] and
Welcome back.
Post by DavidKPost by Steve HaguePost by Sid Nunciusmy new one seems very good. I'd welcome umrats' experience on anti-
(Presumably the delights of Windows 10 aren't bothering you. Though
Classic Shell - or one of the others similar - may make things look more
familiar.)
Post by DavidKPost by Steve HaguePost by Sid Nunciusvirus programs, please.
The laptop came with a month's free trial of McAfee. It seems good,
it is generally pretty unobtrusive and I'm happy with it. Would
umrats recommend paying to keep McAfee or should I just let it lapse
and rely on Windows Defender? WD always worked fine on my old
machine so I'm inclined to go back to it rather than pay for McAfee,
but I thought I'd ask here because umra's advice is invariably
well-informed and valuable in these matters.
[1]"Your hard drive's gone," was the terminal diagnosis. I can't
really complain - it's 8 years old and has had a lot of use. I am
badly in umratic arrears as a result, though.
Assuming you made regular backups, a new hard drive could have been
fitted at a lot less cost than a new machine. (Even without backups, but
you'd need to reinstall everything including Windows, which is a vale of
tears.) All done now, though, so never mind - though depending _how_
gone the HD was (or if you _did_ have backups), the arrears may be
recoverable.
Post by DavidKPost by Steve HagueWelcome back Sid. I paid for McAfee back in the day, but found it got
increasingly intrusive. It might be different now, but I find Windows
Defender more than adequate.
Steve
I don't use Windows, but I understood that Microsoft admitted Windows
Defender wasn't adequate. I may be confused.
I found McAfee fine in a corporate environment - that is to say, my
employer (messybeast) had it, and if it suited them, it can't be bad.
That was some years ago though. For home use, I've never felt the need
to _pay_ for any AV product, but then I _think_ of myself as reasonably
savvy (I nearly fell for a phishing scam a few days ago on my parish
council laptop, but that was social engineering - and no AV software
would have prevented it. Details available if anyone's interested).
For home use, I just use one of the free ones: AVG on this Windows 7
machine, Avira on my old XP (AVG seemed a bit too resource-hungry there,
and Avira less so; AVG's fine here). The in-built Defender has, I
understand, been improved considerably after some version of Windows -
not sure if XP or 7 - before which it was only a firewall; people argue
about whether it's now adequate or not. Personally, I think I'd install
AVG as well - it's free, I find it unobtrusive, and it has (on here)
occasionally popped up that it's stopped something.
AVG and Avast are now, I understand, the same company, though I believe
the products - at least the user interfaces - still look different. (Not
to be confused with Avira. Which I got the feeling was German.) AVG is
basically a four-coloured square; Avast I think is more blobby.
If you _do_ decide against McAfee - as you say, it seems to work well
and unobtrusively, its only downside is not being free - get their own
removal tool; I presume they still offer it, though of course it's not
_easy_ to find on their website. AV products, by their very nature, are
very hard to remove!
Two observations about AV:
1. You never really know how good they are until they fail; it's like
house locks/alarm systems, you ... until you're burgled. You can ask as
you are doing, but:
2. Most private individuals will only have tried one or two products -
and in many cases, the one they're not using will have been some while
ago. So their advice - including mine! - will be at best (in most cases)
only able to compare two or at most three products. There are
professional reviews (mostly online - do magazines still exist?), but
(a) you can never be sure how independent they are, (b) even if they are
trustworthy, the weight they attach to various criteria - false
positives, response time to new threats, resource loading (how much they
slow the computer down - and _that_ depends on whether they test them on
their whizziest machine), what the AV products _do_ when they find
something - will be different to yours. The best reviews will rate the
competitors in various categories, and let you make your own weightings.
Good luck!
I think _most_ people can survive without really suffering, especially
if they make images (I use Macrium) of their OS partition (and any
hidden ones) from time to time, against not just malware (such as
ransomware), but also HD failure - and back up their data partition (I
use SyncToy, but it's basically just a copy, that just makes it faster
by not copying what's already copied). Though I'd use one of the free
ones (AVG at the moment) as well, as I see nothing to lose other than
intrusiveness.
(Oh, my council laptop seems to have Norton on; I presume that was put
on for me, and is a paid-for one. From time to time, I get a popup
offering me some extra part of Norton [such as guarding against dodgy
websites] for free as I have the product anyway. Sometimes I say OK - at
random really.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)***@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
"When was tomorrow yesterday, Mr. Marlowe?" (The Trouble with Harry)