SLOAN RANGER

Excellent anti-virus detection

A new challenger joins the ranks of the free anti-virus software offerings

WANDA SLOAN

The biggest concern of Post Database readers seems to be security. Very bad people have essentially reversed the entire concept of personal computing. Instead of actually computing, we spend a large amount of our time trying to make sure someone else isn't using our machines for his (always) evil purposes.

This concern, sometimes exaggerated but never wrong, has made the security firms among the very richest software companies of them all. That's why I have been showing for some time how you can be even safer if you spend no money than if you shell out for those huge, confusing security programs that act more like The Blob in controlling you than like a fit, trained bodyguard keeping watch over your machine.

I have often recommended both AVG Free Edition (free.grisoft.com) and avast! Home Edition (http://www.avast.com). I also like ClamAV for Windows (http://www.sosdg.org/software.php) because it also has versions for other systems.

I have spent a while looking at a fourth possibility, and I must say I am moving it to the very top of my anti-virus program list.

Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition works on Windows 98 to Vista. It also works on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

It runs in the background as you compute, and in my tests was extremely effective (without being intrusive) against Internet-based threats. It also conducts scans of folders, drives or the entire computer system, on schedule or demand.

It will get updates for its anti-virus database, often daily. But the reason I liked the program was because it finds threats heuristically, meaning based on looking or acting like a bad program, and not merely because someone discovered last year that it was bad.

I would not use a basic security program without heuristics. Anybody can find last year's viruses. I want a program that will find next week's.

AntiVir suggests you update the program before you even start it. This is obviously a good idea, since the virus database is updated a lot more, and more often, than the basic software engine.

It took me a couple of minutes to get the first update. Everything went smoothly, except for an unexpected popup suggesting I might want to spend 1,000 baht for an update to the pro version of the program.

One computer reboot later, the program installed itself with a little icon down in the system tray (near the clock), and I ordered AntiVir to entertain me.

One little touch I liked here. After I selected the drives and folders I wanted AntiVir to scan for trouble, the program offered to make a specific, desktop shortcut to perform precisely this same action any time I click.

This is the sort of detail I expect in a 13-megabyte program, if only to prove it's not just bloatware.

This is not a fast scanner. And the way the program works, it does not make it easy to simply go outside and have a couple of ciggies while the scan completes.

AntiVir wants to stop and ask you what to do when it runs across a nasty file. It will suggest that you quarantine it, and further suggest that it simply do this every time it runs into a program it doesn't like.

This requires a lot of trust in a program you have just put on your computer. What if it gives a false positive, that is, what if it thinks one of your trusted little utilities has a virus or trojan in it?

The only way around this dichotomy is to let AntiVir do its thing automatically, as it suggests, and then carefully check the results of the scan when you have butted out your cigarette and return to the machine. Just do a fast check to ensure you haven't accidentally taken out a needed, trusted, program. If you have, the Quarantine tab on the program provides an excellent, extremely simple options on un-doing the action.

Note: I am not saying AntiVir does this, ever. I am saying that a good anti-virus program will always err on the side of caution, and a false positive is a possibility you, the human, must consider from it, the unintelligent program.

In my tests, AntiVir didn't make a mistake. It detected 15-year-old viruses dating back to the days of Post Database legend John "The Maven" DeHaven, and it picked up two trojans I obtained a week before, specifically to test the program.

In its first scan of my family's very busy, heavily populated 120-megabyte hard drive, AntiVir turned up every one of the 24 nasty files I set out for it - including inside Zip archives. It also found an actual trojan in a folder used by my youngest and most innocent unpaid child labourer, another destructive program in an old System Restore archive, and several very troublesome and potentially harmful Java scripts in an Internet cache.

Colour me impressed.

There is a short list of pretty minor kvetches about this program.

It didn't ask if I wanted it to start with every reboot, and it's almost impossible to stop it. It set up a daily, automatic update check without telling me, although I could change it easily under Scheduler, plus it was polite enough not to initiate a daily scan without my permission. Its logged reports are unspectacular text files, although the Quarantine tab has very nice details.

To uninstall the program, you must run Setup again, or use the Add or Remove Programs choice from the Control Panel.

That's about it, except for the major drawback of the free version of the program: It does not dynamically check incoming email for problems, although it thoroughly checks mail during the disk scanning.

Note that this is a problem only if you use POP3 mail and a program like Eudora or Outlook. If you do your email at Yahoo or Hotmail, say, this will not affect you. The paid version of AntiVir checks email as it arrives.

Avira AntiVir even has a nifty web site: http://www.free-av.com.

Email: wandas@post.com

Bangkok Post

Last Updated : Sunday April 08, 2007