Antivirus Suggestion

[mpking]

I"ve been running Sophos Antivirus for the last 8 years. It doesn't bother the recording service at all unless it's performing an active scan, and I've timed those for when I have no shows recording, or anyone is even home.

However, since I've switched jobs, I've lost access to the updates for it, it was free for employees.

Anyone got a suggestion for a good FREE av that plays well with GBPVR. The last time I experimented with AV's (Sophos wouldn't update on my machine, so rather than fix it, I removed it, and tried out some freebies) I ran into a bunch of perfomance problems. (Stutter on playback) It made me hunker down and fix Sophos.

My primary problem is that GBPVR is on our daily uses machine, so I need AV. Also, the machine is pretty low end now. (P4 2Ghz, PC2700 1.2GB of Ram)

So any suggestions? (Besides upgrade the computer)

So far the front runners, By name association only are:

AVG
Avast!

[pcostanza]

I believe both Computer Associates and Bitdefender offer a free version. I use the paid version of Bitdefender after using the full version of AVG for years but found that AVG was more of a resource hog for me where Bitdefender was not.
I think AVG and Bitdefender are both good though I've had a few false positives with AVG.

[ACTCMS]

For years, I've been using a combination of AVG Free, Winpatrol and SpyBot S & D on all my machines.

I don't do a scheduled AVG scan though - I just run it manually when I want to, but the Resident Shield and Email Scanner seem to do a good job on their own.

Winpatrol and SpyBot do a great job protecting the registry from unauthorised changes. I do a SpyBot scan about once a week.

[martint123]

I used to use AVG for many years but kicked it out recently as too many false alarms.
(I deleted, without asking, my old Pascal compiler).

I moved on to Antivir http://www.free-av.com/ and other than it's (stoppable with a tweak) nag screen, it works well.

I don't scan iften either, relying on "on demand" scanning of executables and email. I might do a full scan once a month or so.

[ilovejedd]

I use Avast!, Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Windows Defender at home, but then again, the PC it's installed on has a dual-core processor (C2D E7200). I have Avast! scheduled for a once a week full system scan and mostly just rely on real-time system protection.

My slow GB-PVR set-up isn't running anti-virus, I'm afraid. :o Just Windows Defender.

[HtV]

I used to have AVG but since the last upgrade to vs 8 that turned out to be a real resource hog. Then I switched over to Antivir, the only drawback on that is the popup screen when it updates the virus definitions. It comes out of the tests very well too.

[mpking]

I use Avast!, but then again, the PC it's installed on has a dual-core processor (C2D E7200).

I think my last go round with Avast! was giving me performance problems. I wish I had the free cash to to get a C2D 8400, but that's not in cards.

Antivir is sounding promising.

[smajor]

I'm pretty happy with Avast!, for what it's worth. The lowest end system I run it on is a P4 2.4GHz, however. Unless you count a couple of Virtual Machines on OS X and it doesn't cause any trouble on those.

[AmericanSlon]

I am also running avast on my GB-PVR machine. It's a dual core X2 3800 though...
Overall I am very happy with Avast

[ilovejedd]

For what it's worth, I used to run Avast! on a socket 478 PIV 1.7GHz. Worked fine for recording HD with GB-PVR and watching SD content. However, watching anything HD was a no-no.