My friend's family computer got a Trojan and was forced to wipe the entire drive. When they rebooted and everything it turned out that there was still a Trojan on the computer. He is still using the same antivirus system, McAfee. Personally, though, i use the free 2011 edition AVG and it works great.
Since the computer was mostly my friend's dad he didn't want me or himself to try and download AVG as it might interfere with McAfee.
Should I tell him to ditch McAfee for AVG free or what?
Norton actually is a virus because when I had microsoft security essentials installed with Norton still on my computer it took over my firewall and wouldn't let me on the internet untill I deleted it.
You aren't suppose to have two anti-viruses on at the same time. They will conflict with each-other and that's probably why one thought the other was a virus.
Avast in my opinion is great. It's helped get rid of all the viruses on my bigger computer (yes I have 2 computers but there both laptops). Over the years my mom was too lazy to backup any files or get an antivirus until finally one day a single virus nearly wiped out the hard drive. That was a good enough scare to get my mom to get an antivirus(i'm the computer master in the house so I did everything). Anyways I recalled back to my memory where I saw a video called animator vs animation. There was a little stick figure on his screen so he was fighting it with his mouse until finally avast got rid of it. Oops sorry i'm trailing off again. Anyways I downloaded avast, did an entire system scan and it came up as 17 infected files. 9 of them were duplicates from a single virus. Up to that day it never had any more viruses. As for a popular brand called AVG I've heard it slows down computers a lot plus I once saw a virus that pretended to be AVG. As for McAfee I think it's a bit pointless since there so unpopular they have to come installed within a brand new computer. Norton does the same thing too. I fell that I should mention that I convinced GhostOfMatrix to switch from AVG to avast and then the mozilla Firefox was working better. That's my story/reason why avast is the best.
I know of a antivirus program called Combofix that works like a virus to get rid of the virus[es], I think. It's free and downloadable, but I think that there are some that aren't the actual program, so instead of the antivirus you get a virus. I think you have to go to the website itself to get it.
Combofix is VERY powerful, but it's very dangerous if you use it without knowing how, you may end up killing your own computer. If used correctly it can clean out viruses that traditional suites can't. Many antivirus programs detect it and similar programs as viruses because I think they go deeper into the system and the programs do not recognize them.
As for antivirus suites, I personally use Kaspersky, but NOD32 and avast! is also good. Malwarebytes is a good scanner, and can be upgraded for realtime protection. I tried AVG and Norton, and IMO they're pretty slow.
For free protection, Microsoft Security Essentials is actually pretty good, but you need a Genuine copy of Windows.
