12/04 Wolfman Wednesday

For me, i have a desktop with 4 HGST 4TB drives for backup(best drives money can buy for long term durability and safety). All of my most important stuff like taxes, lease docs, rental forms, are saved on Google Drive so I can access them anywhere.

 

Title: Label image | PANDA
Requester: Bartek [A3RWHQHYQ0UOC9]
TurkerView: [ $ / hour ]
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Duration: 60 Min
Available: 3
Reward: $0.05
Qualifications:

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I haven't used Avast or AVG - I've usually stuck to name brands because I ran an office and couldn't trust the interns to not look up porn or clickity clack on everything. Windows Defender always blocks so much weird stuff that I typically find it annoying. I'll look into this though because I'm tired of paying so much money to "defend my computers" but am just in the danger zone of probably needing it defended out of lack of back-up skillz.

 

I do have the most, most important stuff in google drive (we travel so I have to access) - and on a back-up hard drive, and some stuff going to drop box but I am a lazy back-up-er. I'd like something that I can set to a certain time every week and just not think about it, but so far have found those programs overly cumbersome or hard to figure out.

When I ran a company for 11 years we used Norton, when I switched to sole proprietorship I went to McAfee because I hated Norton and all of it's insane installs bogging down our computers, now I just want to get away from those if I can, but I don't know if that is possible. I'm not a "put a firewall up myself" person... yet.

 

Name Brand like Norton and McCafey? Please dont tell me you used those...

 

Well I did.... because I was a normal consumer in those days....but they were horrible on all fronts.
So now not sure what my best course of action is.

 

Norton and McCafy are literally the worst options you could ever choose. They are good for commercial use, but only because major corporations know the name and the marketing departments for Norton and McCafey put them on every new Windows computer by default. Outside of that, they are actually some of the worst products you can buy. Not your fault by any means, but there are much better free options out there.

 

Yeah I get that. After years of using and not using them. They have doinked up many a computer in my house.
Buuuuut - not sure what my now best option is.
Looking into Avast and AVG now....

 

Im trying to find reviews for you right now. You have to also consider that AVG, Avast, Panda, etc, are all free options with the option for much higher end features if you feel so inclined to pay. I have NEVER had a virus on my computer that I didnt put there myself through sketchy practices and purposely disabling the anti-virus to do the sketchy stuff. That was with any of the above mentioned products. None which I have paid for since they are all free. Avast has no ads and no popups. AVG got to the point where it would create a popup nearly every hour asking me if I wanted to upgrade. Sad to see considering it was one of my favorite anti-viruses for a long time.

 

I also irregularly run Malwarebytes on everything and that seems to have solved problems in the past, but again that is hit or miss

 

I actually ran that too on my personal computers however it never found much. Now, after my mom inadvertently allowed herself to be hacked which I had to resolve, it found stupid amounts of stuff on her computer. Like you said, its hit or miss, however these days as long as you dont purposely disable stuff on your computer, its rare youll have anything for these programs to find.

 

If you are looking for best free option or best paid, I have personally used Bit Defender free and it was very good. Blocks a little too much which I found annoying, but it was reliable. Like I said though, as long as you arent doing dumb stuff, i would focus on the free options since I have been running a laptop with Avast now for 8 years with no issues and doing LOTS of torrenting on it. Even the version of windows its running is less than authentic. lol. My personal desktop which I'm on right now has Avast and its worked very well for me.

 

So sounds like Avast is the better option? I'll pay for something. I just don't want to pay a zillion dollars if it's not necessary. Will I accidentally open a file from something that looks like our car warranty if I thought the car dealership was sending over something for us to print and sign because we had a scratch on a lease - yes. Will I open dumb stuff - typically no. But I've had some legit looking stuff that I put in the trash (census bureau) that could have been real or fake....

 

I'm liking this, but it is truly frightening.

 

Thank you - this is really super helpful.

 

@IcyTundra

https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/267984/the-best-free-antivirus-protection

The only reason I kept harping on Avast is because I was forced to switch from AVG after the popups literally almost made me throw my computer out the window. They were so bad. Avast has zero popups, never nags you to upgrade from the free version, and considering my rather fast and loose lifestyle of downloading everything whether its legit or not, I have never had a single virus on here even when I personally disable the anti-virus to do sketch stuff. The only time you will get annoyed is like I said, you are downloading a torrent that has a crack that you need to run. Any good firewall is going to delete the crack upon execution, which Avast did every time until i temporarily disabled it.

Sorry for sounding like an Avast shill. I promise I'm not, it's just what I've been using reliably that hasnt made me frustrated.

 

Malwarebytes in itself, turns itself into malware over time when it starts pushing the premium version. It becomes the very thing it was meant to destroy.

 

Good morning fellow early risers!

 

Avast sounds like my jam. I'm not cool enough to torrent crack anything (I think) (unless accidentally) but I hope to be some day. That said I may have some questionable name brand accounting software versions on my computer... so I realize how ridiculous this sounds. I guess I'm mainly trying to protect my computer from viruses from accounting shit. Not porn, or Kardashian click bait, or whatevs.

That software shizz has all your info SS#, Tax ID's, account #'s, so I guess that's why I'm now a bit offline-ish as much as I can be and still function as a business but also trying to keep things safe....

So appreciate your advice to a nerd.