This is my first post on the Security forum page and admittedly I did not perform a search as I could not narrow down the subject matter. From the following example: http://computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/61703.html Quote "AVG popped up "virus detected" on her computer. She does a scan and AVG finds 31 infected files." End of quote (I added the bold) Is AVG an Anti-virus program or just a virus detection tool? Meaning is it supposed to stop viruses or just detect them once infected? Has anyone ever seen AVG pop up and state "Email contains a virus; what do you want to do?" or "this webpage contains a virus; what do you want to do?" I would love to hear from someone that has actually seen the latter. Bryan

Hi Bryan I get virus attachments in spam email. AVG7 detects the viruses and advises me that they have been put into the virus vault. This stops them infecting the machine. I then manually empty the vault. Derek.W

If you don't keep your virus definitions up to date new viruses can infect your computer then when your update the definitions the anti virus program will find them. People think the definitions are being auto updated when some times thay are not. Allways run the updater manally once a week or so.

Derek and Paul, Thank you for your feedback. Derek, I saw your response earlier but had hoped to see additional responses similar or contrary to yours. I am presently not using AVG but have personally seen/cleaned a few machines that were running AVG where AVG has detected infections. Each had the auto-update running. Of course, the first thing I did was check for an update prior to running a scan with it which then found the infections. Perhaps the Heuristics feature of AVG is not near as good as McAfee's that I am accustomed to so it doesn't recognize a possible problem. Only finds those that are listed in the .dat files. It is my understanding that a good anti-virus program reads the signitures of a file and compares it to the file itself and if the checksum is different then it is flagged as a possible virus. Maybe AVG does not do this. What should one expect for free? I wonder if the Pro version has this capability? I recently bought a new PC running XP Pro and will run McAfee on it because of my experience with the product. However, my older machine is running Win98SE and it is my conclusion that McAfee is no longer concerned with Win98 and is no longer compatible with many Win9x machines. My Win98 machine is due for another McAfee walectemy and I don't want to use it on that machine any more. It causes it to crash almost every time I update the .dat files. I or it already killed one hard drive on me that was less than two years old. I had been using McAfee for about 5 years on that machine without a single virus. Since I was forced to upgrade to Version 8 last year is when I found it no longer compatible. So Derek and Paul, you do have confidence in AVG if used properly to "protect" a PC? Thanks and regards, Bryan