File protection and antivirus.

[wolfman2212]

hello everyone.

so for the last few years i have been using the eset smart security bundle as my weapon of choice against the malicious and evil stuff that can hurt my computer. however lately a suspicion has risen in my head that this system might affect my connectivity. (higher latency ,a somewhat slowing down of connectivity etc.).

so my questions are as follows :

1) can anyone confirm or disproof this?

2) can anyone suggest another, user friendly and reliable file protection system?

cheers for the time invested reading this

[Durebista]

I don't know a lot about ESET, I used to have it at work because we had to update the antivirus by hand on most of the computers in the field (no internet access), can't say I like it.

At home I use Zone Alarm Free Antivirus + Firewall its light on resources, the program control may annoy you when you start a game and it tries to connect to the internet (at the first start of the game/program). Also used the Internet Security Pro from ZoneAlarm for ~3 years at my moms business.

Don't know if this helps you.

All the best,

[ticktock1231]

I use Kaspersky, it is rated one of the best...but...there is the draw back that being so good it WILL take up a bit of your resources. The thing that I found is the worst drain is the Web Anti-Virus. What it does, is any data being sent has to be scanned. The thing I like most about Kaspersky is that you are give choices about what features you want or don't want, and what features will have heavy scanning and what ones will stay light. Since I don't chat online you can turn the IM AV off, but since I download software and other files from the web, my web-antivirus is pretty strong.

The point being, is to look in to ESET and see if they have different levels and play around with it. Also with windows 8.1 the task manager can show you network usage. Maybe it isn't ESET and it is something else. Hope that helps.

[wolfman2212]

cheers guys.

[CynicalJD]

Late to the party, but check out home.sophos.com its free, cloud based and very light weight on your system.

[AnjunaBob]

I typically run my Win8 and above machines with Windows Defender, it provides as much security as Microsoft Security Essentials and has done a good job in the past. I block all the ad sites with my host file and install malwarebytes free on the side for manual scans once a month. Malwarebytes has Anti-Exploit free which will protect the most common browsers and Java from script exploits. Pretty handy but as long as you aren't going to random sites and clicking on every image that says download you are relatively safe with just these apps. I did end up removing Anti-exploit because it was interfering with another program, but for everyday use and gaming I'd say use it.

My current setup is Win10 with Windows Defender and since it's setup for gaming, I only download from game clients. I do still use my ad-blocking host file.

If security is a major thing, Bitdefender does a good job and has one of the smallest footprints, AVG and Norton have decent protection but are bloated to a point where I won't use them. A good anti-virus is one that downloads updates frequently, has the most definitions and doesn't nag you.

I've seen viruses get past every Anti-virus software, so when people say "use common sense about where and what you download," that is the best protection you can get.