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Author Topic: What AV do people use?  (Read 9397 times)

niemand

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #15 on: September 28, 2020, 10:03:38 AM »

Will see if I can find a digital copy of some information on this. There's documentation in hard copy in a couple of the books on my desk.
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Weaver

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #16 on: September 28, 2020, 10:10:21 PM »

I would have thought that device drivers can do absolutely anything, including any kind of evil ?

So if you are unfortunate enough to download an evil one, then it’s game over.

That’s why I would never log on to my own systems as administrator, and would would only download programs from reputable sources; anything new that needed to be evaluated would be downloaded into a test machine, which would usually be a virtual machine, for convenience, always thrown away afterwards, rather than a spare test system.
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Floydoid

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #17 on: September 29, 2020, 09:11:40 AM »

Yep if you really need to update drivers then go directly to the manufacturer's website - never trust them from elsewhere. I have never trusted applications such as driver scanners which supposedly tell you what needs updating. Generally speaking if everything is working OK then there's no need to worry.

Similarly codecs - on all my previous PC's I've always installed the K-Lite Megacodec pack. The current one, my first M/C running Windows 10 works perfectly well without a 3rd party codec pack that I simply haven't bothered.  Codecs for all common audio and video file types come pre-installed with Windows nowadays... on the rare occasion you find a really obscure media format that won't play, then you can do a web search for that specific coded and install it.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2020, 06:31:27 PM by Floydoid »
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #18 on: September 29, 2020, 11:00:17 AM »

I would have thought that device drivers can do absolutely anything, including any kind of evil ?

I believe they've been trying move it towards a more abstracted system where the kernel sees what memory addresses the hardware is allocated and strictly limits where the driver can access based on what kind of device it is, allowing you to move the bulk of the driver to user mode where it can't do anything the kernel doesn't explicitly allow it to do.  This initially was focused particularly on GPUs so that they do not take the whole system down if the driver crashes and can simply re-initialise, but its my understanding they are trying to do this across the board.  (of course I may be completely misunderstanding something here)

Its definitely notable as I've had GPU crashes on Linux recently and while it doesn't crash the OS, the display never recovered and I couldn't safely shut down as it would wait indefinitely for the GPU driver to close, which it never did.  Windows in comparison that seems much more rare since the changes they've made.
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Weaver

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #19 on: September 29, 2020, 02:48:23 PM »

I never had a BSOD crash or any kind of badness ever in Windows NT family o/s in 12 years of running lots of PCs, my own plus customers’ boxes all Dell and Lenovo. I only used Microsoft-supplied drivers.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #20 on: September 29, 2020, 09:22:56 PM »

I never had a BSOD crash or any kind of badness ever in Windows NT family o/s in 12 years of running lots of PCs, my own plus customers’ boxes all Dell and Lenovo. I only used Microsoft-supplied drivers.

I've always been a PC gamer so that's never been an option.

That said, mums PC has gone into meltdown and THAT is Microsoft only drivers.  None of the Win10 apps work (including the start menu) any more.
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Weaver

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #21 on: September 29, 2020, 10:03:54 PM »

If I were a gamer and had to use drivers of dubious reliability then I would play games on one box and do my important work on another. Software that doesn’t place nice, for example essential apps that won’t work unless you are an admin, and which can’t be hacked and modified suitably, are run inside a VM. That would not be fast enough for games, I can’t imagine.

Sounds like mum’s machine needs a clean install with straight Microsoft (non-OEM) Win 10. I would usually put a new superb disk into a machine, install O/S onto that and then copy important user data selectively over from the old disk (no executables of course!). And then you still have the old disk has as a backup long-term, in case anything gets SNAFUed right then or later.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2020, 10:06:37 PM by Weaver »
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #22 on: September 30, 2020, 07:10:38 AM »

Gaming actually can work in a VM but in order to keep latency low enough you have to dedicate CPU cores to the VM only which means you're losing resources in your main OS all the time, even when the VM isn't in use.  Plus its never quite as optimal as native which is a waste.  But I do all my main stuff in Linux and only gaming in Windows, dual-boot is good enough most of the time and once I can get a new GPU I will have a backup PC for when I don't want to boot out of Linux.  I mean to be fair, I have a gaming laptop already but its so darn loud is not always ideal and I've been playing with AI upscaling photos and video, so I need more GPU power to speed that up.

As for mums PC, yeah I do think Windows Update has broken something pretty bad but she wont give it up long enough for me to do anything about it.  I'd just replace the whole machine but its an All-in-one, she has no space for anything bigger, shes used to using the touch screen when her arthritis is playing up and can't handle a bigger screen.  There is basically nothing that ticks all those boxes on the market today as the trend has moved to bigger screens and touchscreen models are a huge premium.
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displaced

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #23 on: September 30, 2020, 09:16:14 AM »

I think that as soon as Hyper-V is enabled - it’s a bare-metal hypervisor, so even the ‘host’ Windows 10 OS is just another guest.

The total performance hit is only a handful of frames-per-second on even the most demanding game.

So yes, gaming’s fine under a VM!
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speedyrite

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #24 on: September 30, 2020, 10:33:03 AM »

On MacOS, ClamXAV and Malwarebytes.

What are drivers?!  :D
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parkdale

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #25 on: September 30, 2020, 11:02:37 AM »

Download Windows 10 iso, mount/run and do a in-place upgrade ? mostly will fix things :fingers: if you can prize it off her :)
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Weaver

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #26 on: September 30, 2020, 11:06:50 AM »

Would mum get on well with an iPad?
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Floydoid

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #27 on: September 30, 2020, 02:29:39 PM »

What are drivers?!  :D

Drivers are the bits of software that bits of hardware (such as sound or graphics cards) need so they can communicate with the other software and hardware components of a PC, i.e. they make the hardware usable.
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psychopomp1

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #28 on: September 30, 2020, 03:23:36 PM »

1 - The security industry are starting to get silly with pricing, the products that will still be genuinely an improvement over windows defender charge silly pricing for consumers.
I agree, you can end up paying obscene prices with the high end AV software such as NOD32, Kaspersky, Symantec Endpoint etc. However the trick is NOT to buy the software directly from the vendor but instead use a reputable seller such as Amazon (direct). Though I've given up buying licences on the Bay of Fleas as often the licence key is blocked x months later so stick with Amazon where i know there's 0% chance of the key ever getting blocked.

2 - The issues with various of these software's especially the ones that are always on hooking into programs, have over time caused me compatibility issues, like unexplained memory leaks or crashes.
Personally NOD32 has never given me any issues with other software. You should hardly ever get bothered by your AV software unless its detected a genuine virus/malware, ie it should just run quietly in the background.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2020, 03:38:22 PM by psychopomp1 »
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: What AV do people use?
« Reply #29 on: September 30, 2020, 09:20:01 PM »

Download Windows 10 iso, mount/run and do a in-place upgrade ? mostly will fix things :fingers: if you can prize it off her :)

That was definitely something I was considering, even if a clean install is a better idea there is obviously then the complexity of remembering what was installed.

Would mum get on well with an iPad?

Sadly not, she does a ton of copy/paste operations, cropping images, etc and I know from personal experience that mobile devices are a PITA for that sort of thing.  I will never understand how people can survive using mobiles/tablets only as on PC everything is so much easier (obviously assuming you don't have a disability that makes using a PC more problematic).

There's also the security aspect where its easier to see if links are going where they claim to be by simply hovering over them, vs mobile devices where I'm not aware of an easy way to do so.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2020, 09:25:01 PM by Alex Atkin UK »
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