Is Your Antivirus A Virus In Disguise?
When you find that your computer is infected with some crud the natural reaction is to get rid of it. But how? Most people I know including myself will use the super Google tool to find out what this is and how to get rid of it. In the course of your search, you may land on sites promoting software that claim to be able to rid your PC of this stuff. Before you download that tool ask yourself if you’ve heard of this company. If you haven’t ask your peeps. (Twitter is great for stuff like that 🙂 )
Image by Guillermo Alvarez
If nobody has heard of it, then you may want to avoid it and go with something that is recommended by those who’ve actually used something that works because some antivirus, spyware cleaners etc are actually wolves in sheeps clothing. I’ve been using Zone Alarm for several years now and been happy for the most part. Any software will have it’s share of quirks and minor annoyances and that’s to be expected. My husband uses something else and always complains to me about something while I’m chugging along 🙂
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I found that some antivirus suites re too much of a burden for the system. After lots of testing (and making my PC slower and slower) I deinstalled all these ‘helpers’ and ‘protectors’ and run just the firewall on the router, the windows XP firewall and NOD32 for antivirus. Also I work from an user account with limit rights, what also adds a little protection, but doesn’t have an impact on system performance.
Exactly. Most people don’t realize that routers have a firewall. But the limited rights account is a good thing. I tinker too much with my system. Limited rights accounts annoy me that’s why my apps are sandboxed using Sandboxie, particularly the browser AND Tweetdeck because you just don’t know where those short URLs will take you.
When my computer was infected with a virus and caused a huge crash back in August it was some antivirus virus. The computer guy that worked on my computer was surprised to see that the virus was something coming across as an antivirus software. It was crazy & something I don’t ever want to go through again that’s for sure!!!!
I’m really sorry you had to experience it first hand. Ugh. So frustrating.
This is a big worry for me also as I work from home using my computer and INTERNET all the time.
I believe in just backing up everything and of course having anti virus and sypware protection. I did at one time download one to these cleaning software and afterwards the computer was so slow, I was quicker looking things up using the encyclopedia – you know that set of books that nearly all homes had where you could find out anything about everything :), but had to un-install it again.