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Anti Virus Recommendations

Match

Senior member
This is for my mom's computer at work. She works at an adult education center, and there are a lot of people that dont' know much about computers trying to learn about computers. This means that her computer is not what I would call secure. She needs an anti virus program that will be able to scan floppies when they're accessed, and monitor email attachments. The catch is that she has a 333 MHz Celeron with 64 MB of Ram running Win98SE. I got McAfee Virusscan 7.0 and installed it, but it slows the computer down to the point of not being usable. Is there a freeware version available online that wouldn't bog down the computer too much, but would still be effective? I've read through other posts, and come across AVG, AntiVir, and Avast. I don't know how any of these would affect the computer though, so If anyone has experience with any of these (or others) on an old machine, please share.
 
Trendmicro ( i think that is it) has an online virus scanner you can use for free. It works pretty well!
 
Originally posted by: SaigonK
Trendmicro ( i think that is it) has an online virus scanner you can use for free. It works pretty well!

linkified. i used this exclusively for a good 2 years and gave mcafee the boot. unfortunately, i knew i had a virus once, went to housecall, and it did not find it. i installed norton antivirus. found it and cleaned it immediately. haven't looked back since.

deadseasquirrel
 
Thanks for the responses.

With regards to Trendmicro, it looks like it wouldn't bog down the computer much since it's running online. I tried it on my own computer and it seemed pretty quick - faster than NAV2003. The downside is that my mom can't get online much since there's only one phone line in the building. They need to keep that free during office hours. Also, Trendmicro wouldn't be convenient for monitoring floppies inserted in the floppy drive (i.e. get online, go to website, insert floppy, run scan on floppy, get offline).

With regards to the other programs: Do you guys have personal experience running these on older machines? Could you share your experiences so that I have a little more to go on than just a vote? Thanks.
 
Panda ActiveScan 4 is a pretty decent online scanner also. Doesn't give you as much info as HouseCall but seems faster to me. And sometimes HouseCall has a lot of trouble downloading updates, ActiveScan doesn't.
 
Originally posted by: Match
Do you guys have personal experience running these on older machines? Could you share your experiences so that I have a little more to go on than just a vote? Thanks.
 
I have used Vet Anti-virus on older PCs for the last five years with minimal impact on performance. I believe the international equivalent of this software is eTrust EZ Anti-virus. Works fine even on really old Pentium 133 PCs (with 32MB memory). If you are connected to a network you may want to disable network scanning (can slow down network acccess to a crawl). I would also recommend that you upgrade the memory on your Mom's PC to at least 128MB. For older PCs a memory upgrade is very cost-effective.
 
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