Antivirus & Old Pcs

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NoWhereMan

Same Ol' Question, 2006 edition.

What suggestions for an easy free LIGHTWEIGHT antivirus (and maybe
firewall) for an old computer (I don't remember how old, it must be a p2 or
even older...)

I know this have been answered many times, but you know, every year free
antiviruses and firewalls die and appear :)

Thanx
 
Same Ol' Question, 2006 edition.

What suggestions for an easy free LIGHTWEIGHT antivirus (and maybe
firewall) for an old computer (I don't remember how old, it must
be a p2 or even older...)
Click to expand...

Thanx

F Prot and Kerio 2.15
 
NoWhereMan said:
What suggestions for an easy free LIGHTWEIGHT antivirus (and maybe
firewall) for an old computer (I don't remember how old, it must be a p2 or
even older...)
Click to expand...

I use Avast & SensiveGuard firewall.
 
Isn't avast too heavy?
Click to expand...

Avast is actually one of the lightest in terms of ram usage. AntiVir
uses 25mb here and Avast only about 16mb, plus if you turn off some
unwanted features you can get down to about 8mb with just the resident
scanner only. Hard to beat. I have it on one of my older Win98
machines and it works well.
 
Kerodo said:
Avast is actually one of the lightest in terms of ram usage. AntiVir
uses 25mb here and Avast only about 16mb, plus if you turn off some
unwanted features you can get down to about 8mb with just the resident
scanner only. Hard to beat. I have it on one of my older Win98
machines and it works well.
Click to expand...
I will be loading Avast soon on an old computer, what features do you recommend to
disable to cut size or memory usage?

Mike Sa
 
Kerodo said:
Avast is actually one of the lightest in terms of ram usage. AntiVir
uses 25mb here and Avast only about 16mb, plus if you turn off some
unwanted features you can get down to about 8mb with just the resident
scanner only. Hard to beat. I have it on one of my older Win98
machines and it works well.
Click to expand...

Sorry, just noticed "resident scanner only", I will use it as on-demand only, if
that's similar.

Mike Sa
 
NoWhereMan said:
Same Ol' Question, 2006 edition.

What suggestions for an easy free LIGHTWEIGHT antivirus (and maybe
firewall) for an old computer (I don't remember how old, it must be a p2 or
even older...)

I know this have been answered many times, but you know, every year free
antiviruses and firewalls die and appear :)

Thanx
Click to expand...


You've got a huge range available for a P2 with win98, most things will
run on that. The one thing I'd say is turn the resident scan off, it
hits performance too much on an old P2. Schedule a daily scan, and
always scan media.

Its only when you get down to P1 W95 16M that the choices start to
shrink a bit more, but even there there are several.

Zonealarm is the easy to use fw. Once its all set up, program
permissions done, untick zlclient.exe in msconfig. Zlclient has a habit
of going into a tailspin occasionally, not often. Zlclient is the pop
up yes or no box, and isnt needed for firewall fucntion, only when a
new prog requets premission do you need that running.

Clamwin AV I've not tried, but open source projects tend to try to keep
system requirements low.

THe free dos scanner I dont recommend, a pain to use, no right click
scan option, no scheduled scans, no autoupdate, and thus tends in
practice to be much underused and out of date.


NT
 
On 24 Mar 2006 17:39:22 -0800, (e-mail address removed) typed furiously:

[...]
Zonealarm is the easy to use fw. Once its all set up, program
permissions done, untick zlclient.exe in msconfig. Zlclient has a habit
of going into a tailspin occasionally, not often. Zlclient is the pop
up yes or no box, and isnt needed for firewall fucntion, only when a
new prog requets premission do you need that running.
Click to expand...
Try to get a version from before V6. The bloat of V6 is enormous and
it slows down the machine.
 
THe free dos scanner I dont recommend, a pain to use, no right click
scan option, no scheduled scans, no autoupdate, and thus tends in
practice to be much underused and out of date.
Click to expand...

Only an easy one-time setup is necessary to get them to work like a
charm. Take F-Prot as an example:

------- Create this FP.BAT inside your F-Prot directory ----------
@ECHO OFF
F-PROT.EXE %1 /ARCHIVE /BEEP /COLLECT /DUMB /LIST /NOBOOT /PACKED /REPORT=c:\VIRCHK\F-PROT.TXT
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 START c:\VIRCHK\F-PROT.TXT
------- Adjust options and report path to your needs -------------


------- Save this as FP.REG; adjust path to fp.bat ---------------
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Virustest - F-Prot]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Virustest - F-Prot\command]
@="C:\\VIRCHK\\F-Prot\\FP.BAT %1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Virustest - F-Prot]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Virustest - F-Prot\command]
@="C:\\VIRCHK\\F-Prot\\FP.BAT %1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\Virustest - F-Prot]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\Virustest - F-Prot\command]
@="C:\\VIRCHK\\F-Prot\\FP.BAT %1"
------- Double click to import into registry ---------------------

Now you have a right-click menu "Virustest - F-Prot" for directories,
drives, and files.

You can create 3 different batch files if you want different parameters
for scanning. (For instance to include Boot sector check for drives.)
If you rename the report file to F-PROT.RPT then you can assign the
extension RPT to your favorite tail program and always get the report
summary first, if something went wrong during scan.

For updates you can use Art Kopps FP-UP:

http://home.epix.net/~artnpeg

Use a scheduler to automate downloading if you really need this feature,
too.

BeAr
 
Avast is actually one of the lightest in terms of ram usage. AntiVir
uses 25mb here and Avast only about 16mb, plus if you turn off some
unwanted features you can get down to about 8mb with just the resident
scanner only. Hard to beat. I have it on one of my older Win98
machines and it works well.
Click to expand...


I love aVast, it's the one I use because of its great autoupdate feature...
I was thinking of it as heavy because of the "eyecandy" scanning interface
which afaik can't be turned off
 
THe free dos scanner I dont recommend, a pain to use, no right click
scan option, no scheduled scans, no autoupdate, and thus tends in
practice to be much underused and out of date.
Click to expand...

Every item you mentioned as a drawback ain't necessarily so. There are
updaters for F-prot for DOS which can be scheduled, and techniques for
a right click scan option.

Art

http://home.epix.net/~artnpeg
 
B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson said:
THe free dos scanner I dont recommend, a pain to use, no right click
scan option, no scheduled scans, no autoupdate, and thus tends in
practice to be much underused and out of date.
Click to expand...

Only an easy one-time setup is necessary to get them to work like a
charm. Take F-Prot as an example:

------- Create this FP.BAT inside your F-Prot directory ----------
@ECHO OFF
F-PROT.EXE %1 /ARCHIVE /BEEP /COLLECT /DUMB /LIST /NOBOOT /PACKED /REPORT=c:\VIRCHK\F-PROT.TXT
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 START c:\VIRCHK\F-PROT.TXT
------- Adjust options and report path to your needs -------------


------- Save this as FP.REG; adjust path to fp.bat ---------------
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Virustest - F-Prot]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Virustest - F-Prot\command]
@="C:\\VIRCHK\\F-Prot\\FP.BAT %1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Virustest - F-Prot]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Virustest - F-Prot\command]
@="C:\\VIRCHK\\F-Prot\\FP.BAT %1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\Virustest - F-Prot]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\Virustest - F-Prot\command]
@="C:\\VIRCHK\\F-Prot\\FP.BAT %1"
------- Double click to import into registry ---------------------

Now you have a right-click menu "Virustest - F-Prot" for directories,
drives, and files.

You can create 3 different batch files if you want different parameters
for scanning. (For instance to include Boot sector check for drives.)
If you rename the report file to F-PROT.RPT then you can assign the
extension RPT to your favorite tail program and always get the report
summary first, if something went wrong during scan.

For updates you can use Art Kopps FP-UP:

http://home.epix.net/~artnpeg

Use a scheduler to automate downloading if you really need this feature,
too.

BeAr
Click to expand...

ty, clever.

NT
 
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