Av with the lowest overhaed

[Julian]

No they're not. (a) you could drop windows and go for a system that it's
so prone to malware

That's not a realistic option for the majority of home and small
business users who are non technical and want to run specific software
only available on Windows.

(b) use AVG(windows)

Yes, but it's hardly low overhead (see thread title)

or clamAV(open source)

I already suggested that, but several people are arguing in another
thread that it's not good enough for general use at the moment.

 

[Julian]

If you pay for F-Prot for DOS, then surely you wouldn't mind paying for
the Windows version? It comes with a 32 bit command line scanner. There
are also command line versions of McAfee's scanner.

But I can completely automate the updating of F-Prot for DOS, because it
is downloadable in zip files. The only way to get the scanner in F-Prot
for Windows is to install the whole darn thing. Which I would be happy
to do if they'd do a bit more work making a decent real-time scanner.

My own GUI shell for F-Prot for DOS (Tech-Protect) can and does scan
files as soon as they are written to disk. But Frisk's own F-Prot for
Windows doesn't.

 

[Julian]

Another point of view.... (assuming I didn't miss a similar post.)

Open source developers tend to work on Linux or the BSD variants.
These operating systems don't really have a virus/worm problem, at least
nowhere near as bad as the Windows world suffers. They certainly don't
suffer anything like polymorphics and worms compressed in multiple ways,
both of which need to be untangled before an infector can be identified.

Why would anyone expect this community to develop an antivirus product for
an OS they don't use and in many cases they despise? What possible
motivation would they have to do this?

This seems to be far more relevant to the discussion than the complexity
of producing a product.
(I suspect that if the free/open source software world had a similar
problem, the solution would look very different to todays signature based
retrospective detection

Richard.

That's true up to a point, Richard. The main interest Linux users seem
to have in viruses is doing mail scanning on Linux-based mail servers.
But most of the users of these mail servers probably run Windows, so
they still need to be better at detecting other kinds of malware than
mass-mailing worms.

 

[Nigel Horne]

That's not a realistic option for the majority of home and small
business users who are non technical and want to run specific software
only available on Windows.

My argument was over the use of the word "force".

 

[Julian]

My argument was over the use of the word "force".

I don't really think that's worth arguing over!

 

[Jeffrey A. Setaro]

But I can completely automate the updating of F-Prot for DOS, because it
is downloadable in zip files. The only way to get the scanner in F-Prot
for Windows is to install the whole darn thing. Which I would be happy
to do if they'd do a bit more work making a decent real-time scanner.

[Snip]

You don't have to install the real-time scanner... If you opt to do a
custom install of F-Prot for Windows you can install the on-demand
scanner and updater only.


Cheers-

Jeff Setaro
jasetaro@SPAM_ME_NOT_mags.net
http://people.mags.net/jasetaro/
PGP Key IDs DH/DSS: 0x5D41429D RSA: 0x599D2A99 New RSA: 0xA19EBD34