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I've heard good things about Cloud, particular with regard to its small footprint. Anti-virus software is becoming bloated across the board. There are reasons for that, but some of the reasons aren't good ones.
To be perfectly honest though, I don't use a Windows machine often enough to offer a detailed comparison of any one specific anti-virus package over another beyond some generalities. (One generality is that Norton is still garbage ... just had to get that in there.) I use Windows at work because I have to, and the work computers have some variation of McAfee that's totally beyond my control. At home, I have Avast installed on the Windows partition and have never had an issue with it. None of the computers on which I've installed it that I still maintain from time to time have had any virus problems since installation.
On my Linux box, my security scheme is a combination of many things, including a virus scanner that works totally in the background and checks for virus definition updates every few hours. I check those logs occasionally, and the only viruses it has encountered were things I intentionally allowed it to encounter. None of those would have run on that machine anyway. The point of allowing the attempted infection was to make sure everything I had running was working properly and preventing passing on viruses to others via some networking mechanism.
But this brings me to my point about updates. I have the virus detection set to update so frequently in order to keep the virus definitions database as up-to-date as possible. Without a pre-defined virus definition, virus checkers work primarily with heuristic analysis, which is the geek term for guessing. It's educated guessing, but it's still guessing, and some virus scanners do it better than others. Heuristic analysis is often what leads to false positives as well. You'll note upon reading genuinely independent reviews of virus scanning software that the better rated software often has the problem of generating a higher incidence of false positives.
In any case, it's not that your virus scanner software doesn't *need* to update very frequently. It's simply that it doesn't. Often the difference between commercial virus software and the free versions is the frequency of definition database updates. Usually, you're not even allowed to connect to a server that updates more than once per day, so even if you are able to update frequently via the program itself, you're not actually getting anything new from it. That's how AVG works, IIRC. The free version has updates available once per day, with the commercial version something like every four hours or so. Hell, some companies don't even update their definitions more than a few times per week.
Lacking a specific definition for a specific virus, all your scanner has to work with is its heuristic analysis algorithm, which, again, can only guess.
As I've said before -- and I'm sorry to belabor the point -- the primary cause of virus infection is bad habits. I've been using this same Windows partition for something like three years without doing a reinstall. At one point I was using AVG, but I switched to Avast for various reasons. Checking through the logs just now, Avast has not even encountered an alert since it was installed. (Of course, a large part of this is due to the fact that I rarely even open a web browser on my Windows installation. I'm posting this from my Windows box because I wanted to check some things before writing this.) But I used Windows and DOS exclusively until five or six years ago, from the time I got my first MSDOS based machine back in 1988. I didn't even use a virus scanner until I got broadband Internet access somewhere around 2000. I can recall only a couple of actual infections that weren't intentionally allowed to happen, one from me stupidly executing a binary downloaded from Usenet without running it through a scanner, the other a trojan that got installed with some theme for the Windows eye-candy package Styler. Again, I failed to scan the file, thinking, ignorantly, that surely no commercial software company would allow such a thing to happen. I mean, I paid for Styler! Surely they could keep the third-party sites that distribute themes for their software free from malware.
Learned my lesson there, I did.
A virus scanner is backup. That's all. It's like the chain-link fencing behind the catcher on a baseball field. The ball most likely will not get through that fence, but if you repeatedly put your face up against it, you're going to get your nose smashed eventually, and the ball actually can go through those holes if it hits the fence just so. The best thing is not to stand behind the fence, or if you do, to stand back a fair piece.
In other words, if you only rely on virus protection software to save you from infections and frequently engage in behaviors that are prone to allowing infections, you will be infected. I guarantee it. This is one reason you won't (often) see me complaining how easily a Windows machine can get a virus infection nor bragging about a Linux box being less susceptible to them. If, as a Linux user, I rely on the latter, I'm setting myself up for catastrophic problems. I use the security tools available to me, and I attempt to practice good habits. In those cases where I intentionally engage in more dangerous behaviors, I set up as many chain link fences as I can, put on a helmet, pads, and carry around a catchers mitt of my own. I'll get burned one day probably anyway, which is why I keep my system backed up in a condition where I can restore it to a pristine state in an afternoon.
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