My father had some trouble with his PC recently and try as I might, I could not talk him through getting Logmein working so that I could get on and diagnose the problem. The key symptoms were lots of pop-ups demanding money for visiting porn sites that were never visited and an immense slow-down.
O.K. well that’s odd as Norton Internet security is running, up-to date and should have blocked any nasties.
But it didn’t.
One screwdriver-themed visit from my very charitable brother-in-law, Ian and a load of bubble-wrap later and the hard disk has arrived in the post for a bit of surgery by yours truly. I plug it into a machine that is patched-up, secure and if push-comes-to-shove sacrificable to see what the problem is.
Lo and behold, a nasty “generic” trojan sits smugly in c:\windows. AVG Free spotted it straight away and killed the blighter off. Hang on. AVG FREE as in the not-paid-for anti-virus solution you can just download and use managed to find a virus that Norton couldn’t deal with? Didn’t Dad have to pay for Norton?
Norton is a great security software house and I’ve used their products for years but now I am truly swayed away from pay-for Norton AV towards the free AVG solution.
If you haven’t tried it yet, try this link and get your hands on the newly released AVG Free version 8. Worth noting that with this release, they have killed-off Anti-spyware as a separate tool. The Anti-Virus product does some work with odd cookies and registry entries but you should keep Windows Defender turned-on to be safe.
