Thanks, cb. Weirdly, after I restarted my laptop, Avast was working properly... I now have Avast and Avg.
Running two kinds of A/V at once is
not recommended. They tend to step on each other's toes.
What protection is adequate depends on what you do. I had an epiphany a while back. I had been running Symantec Corporate A/V, courtesy of an employer site license. Unlike its consumer Norton sibling, Symantec Corporate installed with no problems, was light on resources, and would go away without dynamite. But the version I was running reached end of life, A/V signature updates would not occur, and I no longer worked for that employer. A new version would be on my dime. The only things Symantec had ever "caught" had been false positives. I asked myself whether I []needed[/i] to run third party A/V, and concluded I
didn't. I dropped it and haven't missed it.
Viruses and malware are infections, and infections have vectors by which the enter the host. Ward the vector, and block the infection.
The principal vector for viruses is email.
Back when Gmail was still invitational beta, a fellow member of a mailing list I'm on worked for Google, and offered Gmail invites. I grabbed one. It
profoundly changed how I worked. I had been running MS Outlook, for compatibility with the office, and downloading mail via POP. One of the things I discovered the hard way was that Outlook behaves
very strangely when the mailbox.pst file where mail is stored on your system grows over 2GB in size. The symptoms are new mail not being downloaded, and old mail spawning duped like cockroaches.
With Gmail, my mail resides on Google's servers, and I can access it anywhere I have a decent browser and broadband I don't need local copies, and don't lose mail if I have a hardware failure. Gmail labels and filters let me classify mail. Filters apply labels and let me chose what happens to the mail. Most of it is archived, and does not appear in my Inbox. To access it, I select the label from a left hand column, and mail with that label is displayed replacing my Inbox. It works like Folders in Outlook, save the more than one label can be applied to a message and it can appear in more than one "folder". Standard Google search routines can be used, with labels as arbitrary index keys. My Gmail store is a searchable database used in conjunction with other research sources. Gmail also implements viewers for most attachment types, and I can view attachment without them ever reaching my machine. Dodgy attachments are usual virus sources, but since they aren't downloaded, they cease to be a concern. (And Gmail has the best spam filtering I have seen. I no longer
care about spam, because I don't see it.)
I don't worry about viruses because I warded the vector.
Malware attacks the browser, with the most popular target being the old Internet Explorer. I dropped IE long ago in favor of Mozilla code that eventually became Firefox. I didn't do it because it was more secure, though it was. I did it because Firefox was more powerful. But it also meant that most malware bounced off. (And on earlier versions of Windows, I created a Power User profile for normal use. Malware requires Administrator privileges to do its dirty work. Power Users can
run installed programs, but
not install them. If I needed Admin rights to do things, log off the Power User profile and log in with an Administrator account. Windows beginjning with Vista made Power User the default access level, and required jumping through an extra hoop to get Admin rights. I was all in favor, and wished MS had begun that practice with Win2K, which used the NTFS file system with permissions attributes that made it
possible to do that.)
I have Malware Bytes free scanner here, and run it occasionally. (I do
not run the resident protection product.) It never finds anything. I warded the vector.
I run Win10 Pro these days, with built-in Windows Defender A/V and anti-malware, mostly to keep Windows from complaining I'm not protected. I would not actually miss it were it to go away.
Ultimately, I practice Safe Hex. I am aware the Internet has bad neighborhoods, and behave accordingly. I use Firefox as my browser (though Chrome is similarly secure.) I use web based email and do not download mail. I like Gmail for power, but other web based solutions can work. (I recommend against AOL and Yashoo because those services break mailing lists, but that's another issue.)
I download only from known good sources that scan on their end, and most software I get is open source.
I've been using a variant of my base approach for decades. I have not had a serious virus problem since the MSDOS days, and have
never had a malware problem.
My approach won't work for everyone. Some folks have reason to actually download local copies of mail. A late friend ran all up A/V because he downloaded media like British Doctor Who episodes through Usenet binary groups, which are cesspools of infection.
But think about what you do, and where viruses and malware come from, then decide what level of protection you need.
______
Dennis
Who has been in one flavor of IT or another for over 30 years, and has been a corporate systems, network, and telecom admin responsible on part for keeping company machines clean. I have background knowledge I apply to this.
