Active Virus Shield
Posted on June 1, 2007
9 Comments
Over the past couple years, I’ve mentioned a few different free antivirus options. We’ve talked about Avast, AVG and Antivir. All have their pros and cons.
For family and friends I typically go with the Free AVG if they don’t have it on more than one machine at home. If you do, you get warning popups… In those cases, I might look at Avast.
There’s another choice out there that had been flying under my radar: Active Virus Shield. This is another freebie, courtesy of our friends at AOL. Now, don’t panic: No AOL account necessary!
How about this tidbit?
*Powered by Kaspersky Lab, one of the largest anti-virus providers, worldwide.
Kaspersky are those folks who tend to do quite well in most antivirus tests, right? In fact, I’m looking at them for the office network at work.
I’ve been running AVS on my laptop for most of May and so far have no complaints. It’s definitely low maintenance, unobtrusive (no spinning gee-gaws down in the tray) and seems to not use tons of memory (although I can’t quite identify which process it is in Task Manager, there aren’t any huge new ones). No constant chain of little pop-ups every time it updates or allows something. (more information)
I also like that I haven’t seen any “upgrade now” type alerts. Another plus.
I’ll be honest, the days of my intentionally tossing viruses at my own machine to test AV software are long gone… My “testing” these days is more about the user experience and unobtrusiveness. Granted, I certainly hope it actually works too…
So far, I like it. I’m planning to leave it on the laptop and continue to casually evaluate it. Anyone else tried it out? Any experiences to share?
Tags: active-virus-shield, antivirus, AOL, kaspersky
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9 Responses to “Active Virus Shield”
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I couldn’t uninstall it fast enough. Literally. That’s not an expression or figure of speech in this case. I’m not sure where the conflict was, but I got frequent lock-ups where the computer would get caught in a loop and the mouse was all that would move. The time would change too.
I suspect it was a conflict with sunbelt-software’s Counterspy. But removing counterspy didn’t make the Anti-virus work, and removing the anti-virus did make my computer work.
Wish it’d worked. I get really tired of the AVG “So, you wanna do this upgrade thingee?” prompts all the time. Update and scan and leave me alone! Oh well, back to AVG for me.
Rich G, it’s very doubtful it was a conflict with CounterSpy, which should run just fine alongside any AV program.
I have AVS on my spare and old laptop. It truely is one of those set-it-and-forget-it-products: it downloads updates quietly and never pops up anything. AVS is probably the best product from AOL I ever used (with AIM coming in second; however, it’s a resource hog).
Rich - that’s definitely a bummer. I’ve only used it on 3 machines so far (1 of mine, and 2 that I set up for clients) and haven’t had anything like that happen. Hopefully you can get it working.
Yes, have been running AVG for several years now and am really happy with the free version and what it does.
Have been using AVS for a year now
I think this one is great and also free, although it may send user info to AOL 
Setting up a laptop for an employee and it’s barebones as they come so maybe it’ll work here. If so I’ll look into tracking down the conflict on my system.
clicked on the avast link in text at top (we’ve talked about…)and got a report about AntiVir! Clicked on AntiVir link and my automatic download manager opened and my browser crashed!!!!!
Pete - the Avast link is to all articles here that mentioned (and were tagged as) “avast”. If you scroll down, you’ll find more articles.
The download manager and browser crashing is very disturbing though. Which antivir link did that? The one at the top of this very same post?!?