Hey everybody, I'm looking for some opinions here. Lately I have had some viruses and a trojan show up---and AVG never warned me about it. Well, ok, it did when I was running an AdAware scan. That situation has happened more than once.

I had to go to Panda's Online Scan to see them and get rid of them. AVG never even told me when I ran virus scans. That doesn't seem very good to me, has anybody else had this happen?

And the fun doesn't stop there, I'm testing Hauri's VIRobot Antivirus--and it is catching things Panda didn't, lol. Now, I'm very much aware that this happens with antivirus software all the time, some catch more than others.

But, with AVG, I was catching nada, ziltch. By the way, anybody have opinions on VIRobot? Not only is it catching things the other software isn't, but it also is a darn good spyware catcher/remover. It caught a couple of things Spybot didn't.

Anyway ladies and gents, who else is having issues with AVG? I am using the Free Edition, so is the Pro version much much better, or should they be about the same in what they catch?

I have used avg free for a long time now and it has served me very well.

It has also served my friends who have been infected which avg has found and fixed for them.

That is my opinion and you will find that it really is personal preference if something works for you it may not suit others but in general I have found avg as a popular antivirus.

regards,
duncan

The question I ask you is this. Was it a virus, worm or trojan? If it was a trojan there is a good chance most Anti-Virus programs would have missed it. That is why there is TDS-3 which is a trojan hunter and a trojan hunter only. It will find things that NAV, McAfee, Panda, AVG and a lot of other Anti-Virus programs will miss.

For the most part viruses, worms and trojans just do not appear on computers. It normaly takes some type of user interaction to get one.

KTTD

Though I walk through the valley of Microsoft, I shall fear no OS for skills are with me

Hey there Kevin, just some viruses and 1 trojan. I take full responsibility for what I do on the computer and for what I download, no problem with that at all. It's just that if AVG had warned me when I scanned the files before I opened them, I could have avoided trouble most likely.

I scan everything, lol, so much so that most folks around here consider me paranoid. Then they laugh at me when I end up with something. I'll say one thing, AVG DID work for a long time. or else I wouldn't have kept it as long as I have.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting those hard to detect rascals. All I know is that it just does not work well for ME as it used to. How it's holding up on other systems I don't know.

I consider myself a pretty safe surfer, I keep all the scripting issues with IE in check, I have SpywareBlaster running, and I run Adaware and Spybot on a fairly consistent basis. I'm updated as far as Windows goes (minus SP2) and I am behind a hardware firewall. And, lastly, my antivirus is up to date (VIRobot's).

I look at it this way, either the trouble is with me, or AVG. And if I'm scanning the things I download and not opening attachments in email, well, I just don't see me as the problem. If I'm wrong, so be it, but obviously there is a problem somewhere.

I have had a situation where AVG has missed a present virus but as soon as AdAware (I read unzipped it) AVG leapt in and kicked vir-ass.

M

Hey dw226,

I scan everything I download myself. I even scan attachements from friends. That is not paranoid that is safe surfing but as you have found out no AV product is perfect. I myself use NAV 2003 and it has yet to fail me. I've downloaded viruses before on purpose but that was just playing around stuff. If ya visit the dark side of the internet ya take the risk but then again it is no fun always surfing the safe side :)

KTTD

Though I walk through the valley of Microsoft, I shall fear no OS for skills are with me

I used NAV back in 2001 and liked it quite a bit. But hasn't it become a bit of a resource hogger? And yeah, I have been to the shadowy sections of the Net :-) You're right, it's asking for it, but some of the best things on the Internet can be found there.

I don't mess with the hacking websites and all that, been there before and you might as well beg a trojan to install itself, lol. The funny thing is, these viruses showed up in files I've had for a long time, including the .EXE setup file for Opera of all things.

I'm sure it wasn't there to begin with, but heck, I guess I couldn't be sure since AVG seems to have been asleep on me. I like VIRobot, it has a really nice interface, good options, and evidently a darn good scanning engine.

One of the spyware things it found was gator! It had to be an old registry entry that didn't work though, because I KNOW Spybot would have spotted that right off the bat.

If you are running Windows 9.x/Me then you might take the resource issue into play but XP handles system resources so well it is not an issue running NAV 2003.

I keep my system locked down pretty damn tight so I can surf the crazy side of the internet cause the normal side just gets a little boring.

KTTD

Though I walk through the valley of Microsoft, I shall fear no OS for skills are with me

No complaints with regard to AVG, but not a lot of exposure to virus etc. on my machines either.

Favourably impressed with VIRobot - it even runs on 95.

Confusion reigns

Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal

hi dw226,
hauri is probably just as good or better than nod32.
it actually cleans and repairs infected files.
all the best,
murve

I used AVG 6.0 till about a year ago when it quit giving me up-dates when I tried manually. I then switched to Avast! and it TOTALLY blows AVG out of the water with it's on-line up-dates as I surf and also the all around protection. I think AVG is a thing of the past.

If you need a simple solution, try mine. I try to give advise on things that have happened to my PC. Changes in registry can be FATAL! I now have a 95% success rate!

I found that it was missing some things a long time ago but also found out that it helps to have the Use heuristics box checked. Since then no hassles.

Dog's Security Ideas

D4

I'm a self employed PC repair technician, and the number one problem with my customer's computers is viruses.
To date, AVG has only been able to detect and clean one of those viruses. (I cleaned the rest with housecall or Nod32; I no longer use AVG).

Hi Dog, using Heuristics is what I do also. In fact, I've pretty much used it on all of the antivirus software that I've tried. I've never really had any issues regarding false positives, at not as of yet. So I figure heuristics only helps matters.

So far, I'm impressed with Hauri, but I'm sure the rest of them are just fine. I guess AVG just makes me a bit nervous now. The lack of features between a free and paid version is one thing, but the ability to detect viruses should not change, whether you've paid nothing, or or 60 bucks.

Thanks for all your replies everybody, I haven't posted here in a while. And, I can see that all the great people are still here and the forum going strong.

Just tried to load myself up with the 'flu' by visiting a few known 'infectious' sites and AVG did not let me down at all. Came up with warnings etc. when it should have and scan at housecall and panda came back clean afterwards. I did notice however that you are using XP and one thing I've noticed is that even though I'm loggged on as Admin on my laptop, which runs XP, the true admin account seems to pick up things, undetected at the time, that I can only find by going into safe mode and rechecking as the true administrator. For this reason I DO NOT try out sil;ly things like above on that computer. My ME computer however has not had an infection of any sort for 3 years now and AVG is the AV installed on it.

Dog's Security Ideas

D4

Been running AVG free on a couple of our machines here now for a couple years without a problem . Just loaded it on my nieces machine and cleaned hers up , had a half dozen viruses that it cleaned up . I really like it , it is not a resource hog , you can run it in the background and actually do things unlike some others ,can you say symantec . Every once in awhile I will go out to one of the online AV and run a scan and they have never found anything that AVG didn't . Though nowadays my ISP is very good at picking them off at the server before they even get to me . No problems whatsoever with AVG and they seem keep up with updates promptly.

Hello,

I used AVG[free]to scan my laptop,which it did in 50 seconds [30583]files,finding nothing. Yet, I know there is something lurking in WINDOWS\TEMP\fna51847 because Norton AV identified 'trojan.ByteVerify'and said it couldn't do anything.Then the screen went blank. Every attempt to touch this file has caused shutdown,including a scan by Housecall, Mcafee04,Stinger, Avast. I also read somewhere that byteVerify is easy to remove, so maybe some other nasty is in there. Any suggestions would be a help.

Oh man, is it JavaByteVerify? For a while we were close friends. Panda's online scan will take care of that one for you, so can Hauri Antivirus. You know something? Are you using Sun's version of Java?

I might get blasted for making this comment, but I had never seen JavaByteVerify until I installed Sun Java. Right after I did, Ad-Aware brought it to my attention.

Hello dw226,
I downloaded Panda Titanium as you suggested;it was zapped while being unzipped (screen went blank, had to restart), this time the unzip process hung,and with difficulty was persuaded to close by ctrl-alt-del; switched off and restarted a 3rd time; this time Titan4shuk got 3/4 thru the unzipping before the screen blanked. Progress, I thought, so I tried again and got 4/5 thru before shutdown. So I went into safe mode and it unzipped ok. Then scanning commenced; 3 infected files were cleaned. GREAT! So I restarted - boot up got as far as the desktop, the AntiVir window appeared - then ZAP!! Blank screen again. Back to safe mode, ran Mcafee(nothing found), then Spybot, which found, among others, a suspicious little number called 'back Oriface" all of which it took out. Restarted, but again, the screen went blank. Another visit to safe mode, ran NoAdware which found 8 parasites but as I couldn't register (no net connection) they had to be left; so then I ran Nukem which found 6 items in the registry, and while trying to open the registry Mcafee found some suspicious scripting going on in a .vbs file which it stopped. I checked again with Panda and AntiVir, no virus found...but when I restarted: Blanked out at Desktop again! Does this sound like your friend Java Byte verify? (No sun java in my laptop). Any advice would get great, before I resort to formatting. Or a bottle of whiskey.
,

Wow, you sound like you have some problems bud. No, JavaByteVerify won't do all that. You should have just went to panda's website and did the online scan at their website, it doesn't require a download.

BackOrfice, I believe, is a trojan. I don't remember though. I've not heard of NoAdware, I wonder if that is a legit program or if it itself is spyware. It's starting to look like you MIGHT need a reformat. Try panda again, if you can get to it.

If you can't get to it, and you can't download any other AV program without it hanging, well, you may end up being better off starting from scratch anyway. I'd tell you to back up your files before doing that, but you risk a reinfection.

I'd like to see you be able to get a resolution without having to start over, but if your current AV won't work or can't find it, and you can't get to anything else without blanking out, I don't know what else you can do.

Let me know how everything turns out.

Well, after booting up and it looking OK, the virus struck again, and shut down. Several scans later, using the same programs ( Panda -nothing, Spybot - 6 ) I found myself still unable to boot beyond a brief appearance of the desktop. Clearly, something is hiding in there. But what? i read somewhere that if you change the name of the 'vcleaner.exe' file to 'something'. exe, then it will not be seen by the type of virus which switches it off; how does one do that, and is there a similar trick which might work here?

ron

I run NAV and The Cleaner and have on occasion been horrifed to find that they have missed nasties lurking in archives not finding them till the archive was unzipped and in the process of installing and in one instance i wouldn`t have even known except for The cleaners registry tracker.

I did fined CIH remnants in a file i`d had for years too which had never been picked up before and once when i ghosted a backup back onto my system after some "experiments" with the registry on booting NAV found a virus that must have been there all the time. . . .

These ppl should be strung up by their balls!!!

As for AVG i never could get it to run on my systems

Woof

Curiosity may have killed the cat but at least the cat wasn`t bored