Hello everyone!

I've made a lot of great discoveries here on Portable Freeware, and I think that you are the best to answer this: In your opinion, what's the best Open Source/Free A/V Software with the smallest possible footprint?

ClamWin does not have auto protection, so it does not fit. I just want file system auto protection, I do not want nag screens, popups offering products, web filtering, firewall, etc.

It should run on any MS OS, from XP to 7, 2003 Server included.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I think this thread over on InkScape might be informative.

According to this list, the only open source available is ClamWin and I would not use it.

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Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation | DuckDuckGo user | My GPG key | Projects donated to: VLC, CubicExplorer, Ditto, Greenshot, TrueCrypt

Thank you, webfork.

Closed source, any good and free solution?

I generally recommend Avast: it works smoothly and gets out of your way. I don't recommend Comodo (trust) or AVG (bulky).

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Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation | DuckDuckGo user | My GPG key | Projects donated to: VLC, CubicExplorer, Ditto, Greenshot, TrueCrypt

You're linking to a 3-years old comparison that was fundamentally broken anyway.

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I've been using Avast on all my machines, it runs quite good on my 10 year old pc - even better on my 64 bit quad core.

Well said, webfork. Thats all that I could ever want: an AV that gets out of the way.

I'm using Avira 8, but a compulsory update is forcing users to install the 2012, which has popups, nag screen, Ask toolbar, bloated...

All we want is an unobtrusive solution.

(Tried all of those recommended AV in the recent past and I didn't like any, and almost none installs on a Server: they always want to sell their solution...)

Used Avast, switched to Comodo, now using Microsoft Security Essentials.

I have a feeling that none of them works 100%, and you still have to make an effort to update your browser, Java, Flash etc.

For example, I had a couple of security incidents where Avast didn't catch malware that my kid introduced into the home laptop, which was why I switched to Comodo.

I also had a scary incident whereby malware was installed on my machine before my very eyes despite the fact I was using the latest version of Firefox, so I switched to Chrome and am keeping my fingers crossed.

Security is difficult business...

Andrew,

To my experience, Chrome provides the best balance between features, performance and security, specially with AdBlock extension.

I'll try Vipre too, which is said to have 'Total security that doesn’t slow down your PC'

Let me guess...your kid has admin rights?

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Same here on my laptop, replacing the Comodo step with Avira... But I got fed up with the false positives, made worse by the absence of easy options to bypass. Currently compounded with free Winpatrol, which alerts me right away about critical system changes. It's been years since I got infected...

On my home desktop, wich acts pretty much as an intermittent server, I run portable Sentinel to make ClamWin resident; it takes some fiddling but I haven't had any problems in over a year.
In case anyone's interested, here's my freshclam.conf content, necessary to keep virus definitions updated by downloading online:
Keep inside the bin folder (or wherever you placed your ClamWin and Sentinel executables) and run freshclam.exe to update...

No, but using old machine running WinXP You know how difficult it is to secure THAT!

But it was definitely Avast having no clue about that particular malware. I installed and scanned using Comodo, and it found and eliminated the malware straight away. But that was over a year back...

acc to the Dedoimedo fellow, using SuRun as well as EMET would probably allow you to use Windows without an AV. I tried SuRun a few months ago but forgot to password protect the user accts so it may have done no good, will get organized and try it again later. Never tried EMET yet. I also use WinPatrol Pro, Tiny Watcher, MJ Registry Watcher and HostsMan with about 9 diff hosts file sources.

I wish there was some firewall type app that didn't slow down performance at all (unlike hosts file) and let me dump in all kinds of blacklists and hosts files and AdBlock type lists in their various formats from all over the internet and then would eliminate duplicates and optimize the file and would also allow us to block entire countries like Russia and China by IP range and then lastly allowed us to have a whitelist that overrode anything in the blacklist so that when the blacklist was updated we wouldn't have to go through and allow some of our sites again. Also, it might have to incorporate some NoScript like functions so that we could allow some ubiquitus 3rd parties like Disqus, Wordpress, only access on specified sites that need them to work. And it should keep track of all site permissions like the old Firefox add-on ExExceptions. And then it should be cross-platform so that same data files don't need to be re-created over several OS'es. A program like that i think i would pay several hundred bucks for.

Frankly...I don't. I'm aware about some architectural issues, but these can't be fixed by users at all and aside from that I used to think that proper access control + keeping system up to date should suffice. A 0-day could still get you, but these are rare.
Obviously, taking care of what you run is the best defense, but that's not going to work with kids.


Cool. You sound like a security geek.
May I ask how many times did the tools protect you?

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This sounds like a (great) development proposal... I'd vouch for such an utility, if only it was portable...