windows defender is ok
avg crap is a fucking nightmare

 

Thanks to all of you for your input !

 

I've spent in excess of a year each running both. I don't run either any more. I do run a decent firewall, uBlock Origin with all the bells and whistles and a free MalwareBytes.

Mostly I rely on solid backups. I've been infected once in the last ten years. Downloading a dodgy version of Internet Download Manager from a random site. God knows what I was thinking at the time. 45 minutes later, I was totally pwned by Ransomware. My backups had me up and running again in an hour or so. The only headache was finding some of the warez that had vanished from the sister site in DCMA takedowns, but what the Russians took away, they also gave back.

I'm not running a potato at all, but I do run stuff that pushes my machines to their limits. Unnecessary resource consumption that provides no discernable benefits isn't something I'm interested in.

 

Please stay with MS Defender! It has a good reputation by a professional German IT magazine c't (Heise).
Also it is well integrated in the Windows OS. Every other AV real time Scanner can be also a security problem which opens holes in the OS and often after an update of the AV Scanner Windows sucks. Avira integrated a cryptominer like Norton 360 (sure you must activate it but hey..sucks also).

1. Simply deactivate the Defender just for the moment for older trusted keygens. eg with the latest R2R keygens i had no false/positives anymore. Also it is really rare that the Defender scans my rar's and gives a false/positive. In general i save my stuff to an external USB drive.
   
2. Make scan exceptions for file/folders.
3. Use Brain 3.0!

Result is a safe, stable and little faster Windows OS. Win!

 

Last edited: Feb 4, 2022

Well, I guess almost everyone had one of those moments where you just realized you've downloaded a malware from an obviously shady website, haha. Regarding resource usage, if you consider 160mb of ram to be excessive to you then you must really push your machine like you said. I used to not use any security tool besides defender, the day I decided to do a simple scan on my computer using a third party tool I discovered a ton of shit, I use a good AV since then. I'm not a security expert so I'd rather rely on security tools.

Defender is garbage

 

Why is it so hard to install VirtualBox with any OS inside for browsing, instead of having one or even two AVs running in the background so you don't have to start a VirtualBox OS snapshot that takes 2 seconds to start and everything you do within it gets erased when you close it, except the files that you put in the shared folder with your host OS.

 

Or using the MS Sandbox for suspicious executables!

 

As I said, I've run both of your recommended antivirus applications for more than a year. I deleted them both. Of the two, I quite liked the Kaspersky free version. I think I must have read a review that told me it didn't offer the protection I thought it was offering. But it was a straightforward install and light on resources, so I quite liked it. Also, it didn't throw up shedloads of false positives.

I had far less success with Comodo. Downloading the free version was a headache. Installing it was a headache. It always wanted me to install a shedload of other free apps that I didn't want. At some point, I uninstalled it and it would never let me reinstall it again after that.

 

Yep, I'm using Kaspersky free since 2022 (the paid version only adds a few extra conveniences really, the protection is the same)... it literally saved me from a Ransomware attack last month.

 

Just disable Windows Defender and setup your Firewall to block all outgoing connections, and then run / unzip your archives in a Sandbox.

You don't need AV software.

 

It's not hard. But a lot of people have experienced VM's being slow performance; or they have heard many people's opinions about it and the resources usage. I do like the idea, but usb flash drives are not all that expensive. You could get a 16gb or 32gb usb pendrive and install a Live Linux distro. Unetbootin makes setting up the drive very easy. You could even set it up as a persistent drive so you wouldn't lose any work and could save changes and even store files like mp3s or whatever. You would just have to pull the key from the machine and boot into Windows for audio work. Depending on the usage amounts of time between browsing and daw work, setting up a real Dual-Boot just for browsing might be going overboard. But you are right in saying a lot of people avoid running a VM.

 

I use Kaspersky because it barely bothers me and offers decent protection at the cost of negligible system resources. I also subscribe to the common sense mindset, but it only takes a single slip to get infected. If you're not walking straight like a good citizen, you're risking yourself, period. I have been part of very secure private trackers where malware spread because users trusted the sources a little too much. Zero reason to reduce your security options if it's not taking your resources. Protect, backup and be suspicious of everything you can't sue for damages.

 

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/exclude-a-folder-from-windows-security-scan

 

Most of the time it's not enough for keygens to exclude the base folder where they reside.
Because when running keygen use temp folder to unpack/execute stuff like dll or packed exe, and it's a very bad idea to exclude temp folder from AV.
Best method is disabling AV before use.

Even if Defender is considered as crap by many, it saved my ass a few times from very bad threats.

 

try this free tool by Sordum : https://www.sordum.org/9480/defender-control-v2-1/