Is it just me, or are anti-virus companies trying too hard these days?
In the good old days, you had the occasional update, real time and on demand scanning. That is it.
How they’ve expanded into anti-spyware, anti-malware, anti-phishing, mail scanning, and even expanding into a firewall like blocking role. Turning any of them off is not easy. And if you dare turn any of these features off, you get dire warnings of the end of the world if you don’t enable them again. Now! And not content with traditional virus, there is a new category of “potentially unwanted software” which seems to be so broad it covers anything.
I have well gone beyond the point where the impact of keeping anti-virus on my main computer takes far more time than it takes to recover from the worse case state of my main box dying. The list of false positives is too long for me to deal with now.
With AVG 7.x I could just about turn enough of it off that it didn’t get in the way. All I want is on demand scanning of selected files, such as fresh downloads. I’ll manually update when I want to, thank you. That’s all I want. But with version 8, it comes with a ton of new bloat that I haven’t found a way to turn off, so off it came.
I tried avast, I can’t stand the interface.
Is there such a thing as a simple AV these days that only does what it is told to? At the moment, I’d rather run without AV than babysit some paranoia propagating marketing vision. The occasional manual selective scan is not unreasonable and all I want.
For the record, in all these years online, I’ve only ever had a single incidence of unintentional infection, which was an IE hijack. I don’t think the net is any more hostile than before.
