Lessons in Patience: Antivirus Programs

In most of life, there is no free lunch. When the free lunch is presented, it should be thoroughly examined, as the ingredients just might be tainted.

What do I mean by that? There are several free antivirus solutions, AVG, AntiVir, ClamWin, and perhaps a couple more that are less known. None of them are truly great, and none are truly terrible. Other than basic frugality, I have been, in the last 5 or so years, using a free solution because the paid versions of antivirus software are no picnic either.

I recently have been using a trial version of F-Prot, which I had used very successfully in the DOS and Windows 95 days. It is remarkably good at identifying problem files, has few false positives, and uses only small system resources. It also, for home use, is very cheap, and uses a model similar to the Apple OS X model for licensing. Five computers can be covered for $29 for the year.

I had tried the F-Prot solution because I am tired of false positives, and less frequent replies to files that I know are good, and suddenly become ‘infected’. This is unacceptable, and it is why I took AVG Free version 8 off all my machines. The Frisk software installed very easily, and was running with no fuss in no time. I was in heaven. I had been using the software for about 20 days when I had a problem with the machine I am working on now. It is very stable when the temperatures are kept down, but it has no onboard sensors (so much for the inherent superiority of Intel motherboards), and the heat sink that came with the 2.8A Pentium 4 is all aluminum, has a small fan, and is of very limited efficacy at cooling the northbridge chip that sits right beside the CPU.

The first thing that happens when the chipset gets hot is that the video gets squirrelly, with no advance warning, and tends to grunge the driver for the Intel Extreme(ly Poor) Graphics. This leads to a long list of things that must be done to repair the problem. One of the things I found very convenient in F-Prot, that is totally unavailable in AVG Free, is temporary halting of the memory-resident portion of the software without a reboot. This made it very easy to add software that might be slowed down by an antivirus program (nearly every hardware installation benefits as modern AV products look very closely at anything that wants to insinuate itself at a very low level on your computer).

Back to the difficulty – when the video drivers get grunged in XP it is difficult to get things going at times (and yes, this is one part of Vista that is better, but I am not willing to pay the performance penalties of Vista – besides, Vista would not just be a pig on this machine, it would be a snail!) What has had to be done (it has happened twice while I wait for my new, large HSF combo) is go through a very circuitous route to get the F-Prot turned off, so that the re-install of the Intel video driver will ‘stick’. Otherwise, it takes a very long time for the driver install, and then, the problem reasserts itself right after the machine is rebooted. The problem with F-Prot is that this cannot be accomplished at a video resolution of less than 800×600. This is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen, so the service must be stopped through the Administrative Services area.  This is no problem, I know, but I was working against time, late at night, and my patience is not anywhere near Job’s. Also, I am one of those people who remains very calm, and has ALL the answers, as long as the hardware involved is not mine.

Along with the video driver causing a problem, the fact that I have an advanced H-P printer, with features that allow for very precise printing of things on the screen, means that the H-P drivers were also grunged, and causing another problem with video going completely black, further in the boot process. (Everything truly is interconnected!)

So after being mad about the problem, and removing the Frisk software prematurely, I re-installed the AVG Free, and so I’ll be whining (to myself, no one else) about the problems it has. (My funds are very limited right now, and I’ll be upgrading the 9 computers in the house to F-Prot when the new year comes.)

So, in the mold of Craig Ferguson, ‘What Have We Learned Here?’ Well, we have learned that Pentium 4 chips probably should never be used in small cases in warmer climates. We have learned that F-Prot, when one is not experiencing video difficulties, is absolutely great, and a bargain at $29 for protection of 5 computers for a year. We have also learned that Intel Extreme Graphics are not only slow and painful, the way that they get grunged easily is very painful, and so they should be avoided, at all costs.

As an aside, I guess you, the reader, have learned that I have my anxious moments as well, even though I’ve been doing this for quite some time – this never happens when I work on someone else’s computer!

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We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.Jeff Marder