Avast kicks AVG's ass today

H

Hell Billy

I was downloading some software through P-to-P, when this really shrill
tone that kinda sounded like a car alarm starting playing. I was out of
the room at the time, and thought that someone's alarm went off in the
parking lot.

But then I noticed that it was coming from my computer room. After the
tone stopped, I heard this disembodied female voice announce, "A virus
has been detected," and a dialog box from my Avast Antivirus was up on
the screen, asking me what I wanted to do. I elected to delete, and the
offending download aborted.

I was so thrilled over the sequence of events, I forgot to write down
the name of the virus, and I suck for that - sorry. But what was
interesting to note was that my AVG didn't pick up anything(I have both
running).

Tough to tell what could have happened here - maybe Avast picked up the
virus first because Avast comes before AVG alphabetically(hey, I know
it's a stretch!!! :)), or maybe AVG didn't have the required sig files
to catch it(damn, I wish I'd written it down!!!!). So, what to you
think? Discuss.
 
H

Hell Billy

Both suck in comparison to KAV.
Click to expand...

I've heard good things about Kaspersky. I may need to give it a shot, as
well. How does Kaspersky compare against the Norton/McAfee duopoly?
 
B

Bill

I've heard good things about Kaspersky. I may need to give it a shot, as
well. How does Kaspersky compare against the Norton/McAfee duopoly?
Click to expand...


It has a better detection rate than either of them.
 
J

Jari Lehtonen

It has a better detection rate than either of them.
Click to expand...

And is nowadays light on resources, scans in compressed files, and can
be configured to detect adware, dialers etc spy- and malware.
jari
 
N

Nick FitzGerald

Hell Billy said:
I was downloading some software through P-to-P, when this really shrill
tone that kinda sounded like a car alarm starting playing. I was out of
the room at the time, and thought that someone's alarm went off in the
parking lot.

But then I noticed that it was coming from my computer room. After the
tone stopped, I heard this disembodied female voice announce, "A virus
has been detected," and a dialog box from my Avast Antivirus was up on
the screen, asking me what I wanted to do. I elected to delete, and the
offending download aborted.

I was so thrilled over the sequence of events, I forgot to write down
the name of the virus, and I suck for that - sorry. But what was
interesting to note was that my AVG didn't pick up anything(I have both
running).

Tough to tell what could have happened here - maybe Avast picked up the
virus first because Avast comes before AVG alphabetically(hey, I know
it's a stretch!!! :)), or maybe AVG didn't have the required sig files
to catch it(damn, I wish I'd written it down!!!!). So, what to you
think? Discuss.
Click to expand...

I think you probably installed AVAST _after_ you installed AVG.

Had you installed them in the opposite order the reported results may
well have been exactly the "opposite" too.

(Think "when there are multiple on-access scanners installed, the last-
installed can "cut off" the "earlier" ones' ability to "see" anything
intercepted by the on "on top of the pile".)
 
L

Lee Higdon

And is nowadays light on resources, scans in compressed files, and can
be configured to detect adware, dialers etc spy- and malware.
jari
Click to expand...

How light is light? Are you talking about it being comparable to the old KAV
3.5 ? Now, that was fairly light and behaved well on all of my systems.
 
F

FromTheRafters

Hell Billy said:
So, what to you think? Discuss.
Click to expand...

I think you should have written it down. ;o)

Anyway, doesn't Avast log its activities ~ check the log.

Having two AVs running resident will give conflicting results
and is not generally recommended.
 
H

Hell Billy

I think you probably installed AVAST _after_ you installed AVG.

Had you installed them in the opposite order the reported results may
well have been exactly the "opposite" too.

(Think "when there are multiple on-access scanners installed, the last-
installed can "cut off" the "earlier" ones' ability to "see" anything
intercepted by the on "on top of the pile".)
Click to expand...

Duly noted - that's exactly what happened. Thanks for the insight!!!
 
H

Hell Billy

I think you should have written it down. ;o)

Anyway, doesn't Avast log its activities ~ check the log.

Having two AVs running resident will give conflicting results
and is not generally recommended.
Click to expand...

I understand what you're trying to say. So, would you advocate just
using Kaspersky then?
 
L

Larry Sabo

Hell Billy said:
I was so thrilled over the sequence of events, I forgot to write down
the name of the virus, and I suck for that - sorry.
Click to expand...

Try downloading the file again; look in your history file for the url.

Larry
 
F

FromTheRafters

Hell Billy said:
I understand what you're trying to say. So, would you advocate just
using Kaspersky then?
Click to expand...

Absolutely, Kaspersky is very well repected. You could also use
F-Prot as a second opinion on demand scanner. I try not to get
into the "this is better than that" debate, but from my observations
in this and other groups - Kaspersky, F-Prot, and Nod32 are all
well thought of ~ and I haven't heard any negatives about Sophos
either (other than that the pricing is aimed at corporations rather
than the home market).

That doesn't mean that any of the others are bad though, for instance
I find that F-Secure has some of the better virus descriptions that
are available (something I value), but I haven't heard too much talk
in here about them. Between McAfee and Norton (which many
consider to be the "Big Two"), I prefer Nortons write-ups over
McAfee's. I am sure that they are all fairly close in detection rates,
and one persons idea of "feature rich" is anothers "bloat", so much
depends on what a person wants the AV to do.
 
B

Bart Bailey

In Message-ID:<[email protected]> posted on
Is the process of loading 3 megs from the disks to memory the
only way to use Antidote? It may be lite but it's not handy.
Click to expand...

It uses the same defs as KAV.
If you have that on board, just do a KAV update, then copy the contents
of common files/avp shared/bases to the antidote folder.
You don't have to use the 3 floppy install, there is a complete package
download on the same page.
 
V

Veronica Loell

FromTheRafters wrote / skrev:
[...]
That doesn't mean that any of the others are bad though, for instance
I find that F-Secure has some of the better virus descriptions that
are available (something I value), but I haven't heard too much talk
Click to expand...
[...]
F-secure has writups in Swedish which is quite nice.
 

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