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Thread: I NEED a new computer ...advice needed!

  1. #11
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    AVG hasn't been good for awhile. Crashes lots of systems, and more hackers hit it since it got big. Comodo is pretty light on resources and should do fine. It does sandboxing too which might create issues, but your IT can handle it.
    Words get in the way of what I meant to say.

  2. #12
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    I didn't know AVG moved down in the rankings. Kellie just tried to explain "sandboxing" to me, just looked at her with a blank expression and said you'll handle it for me, right? LOL! She had Avira and didn't like it so much but I will keep Avast! in mind if this doesn't continue to work. Right now though, my computer is running fantastic and I am thrilled with it!! I ran the initial scan and it didn't find anything so now I hope the program is just doing what it is suppose to do!

  3. #13
    Senior Member ham's Avatar
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    Just to kick into this one, on older computers I'd highly recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. It's very light on resource so doesn't slow your machine down at all.

    It may have weaknesses in that it's made by the people who made the un-safe operating system but unless you download things from torrents or go on naughty websites it'll cover you.

    The other thing to recommend whenever this happens is a program called Malware Bytes Anti Malware. It's not an antivirus, but it's a virus scanner and will remove pretty much any nasty you come across. So use MSE as your day-to-day "let it do it's thing" AV, and then run MBAM when you think you might have caught something, or just once a month or so.

    So many people buy new computers when all they need is a bit of maintenance, so you're always better off asking some techies before ditching a slow machine.

  4. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by ham View Post
    Just to kick into this one, on older computers I'd highly recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. It's very light on resource so doesn't slow your machine down at all.

    It may have weaknesses in that it's made by the people who made the un-safe operating system but unless you download things from torrents or go on naughty websites it'll cover you.

    The other thing to recommend whenever this happens is a program called Malware Bytes Anti Malware. It's not an antivirus, but it's a virus scanner and will remove pretty much any nasty you come across. So use MSE as your day-to-day "let it do it's thing" AV, and then run MBAM when you think you might have caught something, or just once a month or so.

    So many people buy new computers when all they need is a bit of maintenance, so you're always better off asking some techies before ditching a slow machine.
    One other person recommended MSE but my daughter told me it is one of the top unsafe ones to use. Even her computer was hacked while using it. What I have going now is working pretty good, at least the computer is running 100x faster anyway but I will looked into the MBAM program as suggested.

    When funds ever do become available it would be nice to get a new one but for now it looks like this old computer still has life left in it for what I need it to do! Keeping my fingers crossed that all continues to run smoothly!

  5. #15
    Senior Member ham's Avatar
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    Depends what she's referring to. They do safety tests on various sites once a month and I've never seen a consistent leader, they change as they each adapt their engines to suit the newest threats.

    Put it this way, I look after about 20 PCs for friends and family, and only my mum has ever managed to get her machine infected when she clicked on an advert she shouldn't've clicked on. Which, to be honest, is user error.

    I maintain that if you're sensible with a PC and don't do anything dubious with it, you could get away without AV...

    If you don't want to use MSE, I'd try Avast. But it's a bit more resource hungry, and every 12months you have to play a game of "hunt the link to the free version" on their registration e-mail...

  6. #16
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    Good to hear your computer problems weren't that bad Denise. I was hoping you could understand my bad English, but thingie seemed to work
    Quote Originally Posted by ham View Post
    Put it this way, I look after about 20 PCs for friends and family, and only my mum has ever managed to get her machine infected when she clicked on an advert she shouldn't've clicked on. Which, to be honest, is user error.

    I maintain that if you're sensible with a PC and don't do anything dubious with it, you could get away without AV...
    It's still a game of chances. To be fair, I think if you have a good firewall and you are using the pc like you say, you chances of getting into trouble are very small. Still they exist. A few months back the most popular news website of the Netherlands (www.nu.nl) had placed a banner/commercial I think. It was only online for an hour before people noticed, but it had the Sinowal virus in it. In that little time it had infected a possible 100.000 computers. Normally this is a very safe site and I read it daily. With things like this you are pretty much srewed without an AV or good Firewall.

    I have used MSE and Windows Firewall for a long time. Tried AVG after that and I liked it better, but it did slow down the pc noticeably. I now have bought BitDefender Total Security and I really like it. It's not expensive(30 euro/year), is very simple to understand and work with and gets good grades in the tests. But to be very honest it does slow down my photo-exporting a little bit. Non of the photo-editing is slowed down, but exporting from lightroom is definitely slower than it used to. Luckily still fast enough, but I just wanted to say that even with payed packages you can have these problems.

    By the way if your girlfriend has a 14 year old brother that loves to play games without paying for them/cheating/hacking/downloading/doing pretty much all that god forbid and you'll have to take care of that pc... Good luck! Even without Admin rights and AVG installed he managed to screw things up with his "online friends who know how to work around all that". Luckily it all decreased quite a bit when I made a screenshot of all that he did and all that I had to repair and placed it as his background photo

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