Windows 98SE Antivirus ??

coaledsweat wrote:

beemerboy wrote:

coaledsweat wrote:http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

I downloaded and tried the "security essentials" on my laptop. What a resource hog. It brought the computer to an almost standstill. I uninstalled it after a couple of days.

You need to remove all the other anti-this that and the other thing from your computer. I have had great luck with it and mine runs much faster than it did with the other stuff. AVG, Avast, etc.

This is a new install of windows XP Pro. No other anti-virus programs yet. My modem has a hardware firewall built in so I disabled the M$ firewall in XP. I guess everyone's mileage will vary.

I use Norton AV for several years on my desktop and I've never had any problems, yet I know several people that have had major headaches with it.

For years, with my laptop I didn't use any A/V programs and I haven't had any problems. Then again, my laptop is not for any "mission critical" stuff so if I have to reformat and reinstall nothing is really lost.

People bring me infected computers all the time. I keep an old XP computer clean and loaded with fresh scanning software. I pull the drive from the infected computer and attach it to my computer via USB and run multiple scans to clean it as best as I can. I then return the drive to its original computer, boot it in safe mode and run ccleaner to remove as many temp files as possible, update the AV software and then run a few scans. Some of the free products I use are Clam WIN portable (portable=no install), Norman anti malware, super antispyware. Sometimes I have to also enlist Hijack this, combofix & a few others.

Be very careful where you get your tools. There are bogus versions of many popular products or ones with very similar names. I trust filehippo.com for many utilities.

Keep your systems up to date as far as patches, windows, Acrobat, Java, flash and other common software we all use. Most infections come from unpatched vulnerabilities. Consider using alternate software like Foxit reader instead of Adobe Reader or Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. Hackers target the most used software.

Learn what to do when an infection presents itself. These rogue AV infections can come from advertising placed on a legitimate sites by a 3rd parties. They generally employ social engineering. You get a popup with a rapidly changing screen you you feel compelled to hit something fast like 'install this yes or no'. Hitting No is no guarantee it means No so the best thing to do is load task manager (Ctrl,Alt,Delete) and force your browser closed. Do not select ANY option presented to you by this bogus popup. Run ccleaner and then do a full scan to be safe.

Cruising warez (pirated software), pirated movie or music or porn sites is an invitation to be infected. If you have a need to, use a computer where you boot of a live CD of linux to be safe and make sure your internal hard drive is not 'mounted'.

Be suspicious of any email attachment you receive, even from people you know. Last week I got an email from Amazon about an order I placed. It came to an email address (not gmail) I don't normally give out. I scanned the attachment with Security Essentials and it appeared to be clean. I sent it to Microsoft for further analysis and they reported it as dirty and updated their definitions.

I use gmail for most of my email addresses because they do a great job in filtering out spam, bogus emails and infected files.

My 2 cents.

Kaperskey still officially supports Win98 according to their website. I had to install it last year for a client who sees nothing wrong with their Win98 box.

Win2k would get you just about everything XP does except the interface, including NTFS.