Best AV for an old PC?

G

I just brought my old Duron 1.2Ghz based PC back to life after its PSU died out a couple of months ago and have been trying to tweak it to perfection for the past couple of days.

I started out with KIS 2009 but that was a real resource hog (50+ MB of resident RAM). Next up was Norton 2008 but that slowed the PC down to a crawl for some reason. I'm using AVG pro with TallEmu firewall right now but am a bit concerned about AVG's poor detection rates.

Can anyone recommend a good AV (free or paid) that has a small memory footprint but won't open a wide door to all sorts of attacks. I plan on using this PC as a network server in my house.

Try NOD32 v2.7 (if it's still available somewhere).

D

You can also try avira personal(free) or avira premium(paid).

kaspersky 6 anti virus(not internet security) good protection+light weight,best for old systems.

NOD32 2.7 is what you need.
I ran NOD32 ver2.7 on my really old PIII with XP and 256 MB of RAM, and it hardly caused any lag. :wink:

@gforce 23
Whoa! Know what? I love old PCs, and when people try to put good use to them. I had forgotten the 'Duron' name, thanx for reminding.

If you have 256 MB of RAM, Avira Personal Edition + Comodo Firewall should be good.
Also, AVG aint bad afaik. I havent had any infection, I have used it for long.

BTW if your sole purpose is network server, I'd recommend you to try out Linux. Will be good for your purpose, will be virus free.. Give it a thought.

P

IronManForever said:
I had forgotten the 'Duron' name, thanx for reminding.

+1

There's an xcellent alternative, PC Tools ThreatFire

Active scanning, real-time, hard to get such a freeware.

G

After spending an entire day testing a boat load of AVs, security suites and standalone firewalls, I've narrowed it down to two options for the antivirus bit: NOD32 v2.7 and Avira PE freeware. Both have a memory footprint of roughly 10MB at idle and I was leaning toward NOD32 but there's a big problem. Auto updates keep failing for some reason. I've set it up to update from any server but it keeps displaying the message: "NOD32 is up to date" or something to that effect. I'm using a legal/full version, if that matters and even double checked the key ID and password in the update authentication box. I even tried uninstalling it and removed all references from the registry before reinstalling it but to no avail. The timestamp as displayed in the update window is June 29th 2007. Could anyone please help me out?

Avira PE seems great on memory usage but I HATE the crappy interface. Options for scanning and heuristics are pretty limited as well.

For the firewall bit, I tried the two most popular ones around: Comodo Pro and TallEmu's Online Armor. The latter has a crappy Norton style interface while Comodo is quite slick and has a small footprint (10MB), so that's what I'm going to stick with.

@IronMan:
I still have a K6 processor along with its motherboard lying around somewhere in my cupboard!

I would've gone for a Linux system myself but the thing is, I'm going back to the U.S. late next month and my parents have never used anything besides XP, let alone Vista and Win7. It'll be easier for them to tinker around with a computer that runs on a familiar OS.

^ ^ ^ I think you'll need to download an update package from the web and manually update it offline. After that, the auto-update should work.

gforce23 said:
After spending an entire day testing a boat load of AVs, security suites and standalone firewalls, I've narrowed it down to two options for the antivirus bit: NOD32 v2.7 and Avira PE freeware. Both have a memory footprint of roughly 10MB at idle and I was leaning toward NOD32 but there's a big problem. Auto updates keep failing for some reason. I've set it up to update from any server but it keeps displaying the message: "NOD32 is up to date" or something to that effect. I'm using a legal/full version, if that matters and even double checked the key ID and password in the update authentication box. I even tried uninstalling it and removed all references from the registry before reinstalling it but to no avail. The timestamp as displayed in the update window is June 29th 2007. Could anyone please help me out?

Yeah. Thats just a glitch. Dont manually update the AV. (automatic update should be enabled by default)
Once connected to the net, (in about a few mins) NOD32 will automatically download updates (in your case, the first update will about 15 MB and the remainder will be about a few hundred KB or so)
At least thats what happens on my machine.

G

According to the Comodo firewall log, NOD32 has been opening up a connection to the update server every few hours but it doesn't really do anything. The virus database is exactly the same as it was in the morning.

Kl@w24 said:
^ ^ ^ I think you'll need to download an update package from the web and manually update it offline. After that, the auto-update should work.

Have you got a link? I'm too lazy to search right now..

Here's a torrent link:

*www.mininova.org/tor/2142219

G

"Antivirus" updates via torrents? Wow am I dreaming or what?

^ ^ ^ Heck, that's not the strangest thing you'll ever see!

I didn't find any updates on ESET's own site. Strange.

And I don't think it's illegal. They are just a bunch of updates that are released freely by ESET. If you use them for a pirated copy of the AV, that might be illegal.

G

Yeah, I found that strange as well. Kaspersky, CrapAfee and Norton have dedicated servers for downloading offline packages. Anyhow, I'm using a legal copy that I got for free from the ESET server itself.

Quick question about the torrent: is that a cumulative update? I mean as you can see, the virus definitions in my copy date back to June '07. Will this update the definitions and (possibly) the scanning engine as well?

P.S.: I just found something interesting. Google 'nod32 update generator'.

Ahh auto-update seems to work right now. Funny thing is, the total footprint of NOD32 v2.7 + Comodo Firewall + resident Malwarebytes is less than that of my beloved KIS 2009.

^ ^ ^ Glad to know it's working now.

Norton 2009 is good. It will not slow down your old PC like previous versions of Norton did.

If you are looking for something free AVG is the best. But you need to support AVG using some other free softwares like MalwareBytes . So you can be sure that your computer is safe.

G

^^ That's precisely what I did last night after reading reviews about NAV 2009.

My current setup is-
Real time protection:
NAV 2009 (8MB footprint)
Comodo Firewall w/HIPS and custom Defense+ policy (10MB footprint)
On-demand protection:
Malwarebytes MBAM

With the startup processes optimized via BootVis and all unnecessary services disabled, the server is up and running in under 3 minutes which is pretty darn awesome IMO.

gforce23 said:
^^ That's precisely what I did last night after reading reviews about NAV 2009.

My current setup is-
Real time protection:
NAV 2009 (8MB footprint)
Comodo Firewall w/HIPS and custom Defense+ policy (10MB footprint)
On-demand protection:
Malwarebytes MBAM

With the startup processes optimized via BootVis and all unnecessary services disabled, the server is up and running in under 3 minutes which is pretty darn awesome IMO.

That is pretty enough! You dont need to care at all. just keep them updated!

G

Yeah. Just tested everything out today. If all laptops, PCs and mobile phones are included, I have 7 machines connected on my private network!

NAV 2009's "pulse" updates are pretty much mystical at this point. I find myself opening up the NAV interface just to check the latest timestamp of the update. I'm not really sure if NAV actually gets an A/V definition update though. From the Comodo logs, I do know that the program receives about 30-100KB of data every time it connects to the Symantec server but releasing updates every 5 minutes or so sounds a tad like marketing BS.

A

how effective is kaspersky version 7. im using it since some time for my laptop

G

andy_65_in said:
how effective is kaspersky version 7. im using it since some time for my laptop

Thread hijacker,

Kaspersky is quite effective. IIRC, version 7 had a problem with iSwift and iChecker, so you might want to read up on that.
If you aren't using Kaspersky's suite, I suggest you install a good HIPS firewall immediately. Comodo (free), Online Armor (trial/paid) or Zone Alarm are good choices.