Tim O'Leary Anti Virus Information Australian site downloads page

What is a good program

People often ask "What is the best anti-virus program". Magazine reviews are of little use as they rarely compare programs and often consist of company press releases slightly re written. Mostly they concentrate on issues like "user interface" and such.

!|! Rating Anti Virus Programs
This url http://applied.co.nz/html/info/vb100/ takes you to a NZ site that has taken the VIRUS BULLETIN results and ranked them over the years.

The charts and ranking need to be read in conjunction with the notes and with the original VIRUS BULLETIN results at http://www.virusbtn.com/100/vb100sum.html

It is important to note that some highly regarded programs have only recently been submitted and so will rank lower than those submitted for a longer time.

The University of Hamburg, Computer Science Dept. Virus Test Centre

Encyclopeadias

!|! Encyclopeadia and descriptions of viruses.

I favour the descriptions given by SOPHOS as the easiest to understand.

Kaspersky Lab - AVP also has an excellent Encyclopeadia

Data Recovery
| Steve Gibson has developed a FREE program for data recovery after a CIH virus attack. Hard Drive Recovery: The CIH virus erases the first 2,048 sectors (1 megabyte) of each of the system's non-removable and writable disk drives. While this is certainly troublesome, the damage is very often 100% reversible and recoverable! (This is especially true if the drive contained multiple partitions, since only the first partition was truly damaged..)

Download Sites for Anti-Virus Programs

| New Clear, easy to understand advice from Uzi Paz on how to install and operate the FREE program F-Prot for DOS

| New small program to automate updating of F-Prot over the net. All in one. F-Prot Download / Update Utility!! - F-PUP is freeware, by Art Kopp. important to also read instructions here. The program is actually less daunting to use than the instructions

| Rescue Utility
I have just discovered a long hoped for utility - and its FREE. digital56k has released a nifty little freeware program that will create a boot / rescue disk for you and also squash the latest F-Prot (also FREE) + the rescue / boot disk onto two floppies. That means you can create a set of disks easily to clean boot your machine, most important for reliable infection cleaning, and then run F-Prot off the other floppy. This program loads F-Prot into RAMDRIVE so it runs well.
Full instructions on site.

Download Sites Anti Virus Programs
NB: Most of these programs below offer a free, fully functional version for download and use for 30 days.

An up-to-date list of programs and download sites is here at Claymania

FREE Anti Virus Programs
for Personal use.
| Computer Associates (CAI) has ceased offering InoculateIT Personal edition for free. However if you do have it already updates are still available. It is also being offered at a low price to buy. For Win95/98, NT.
Information here: http://www.cai.com/antivirus/personal/

| F-Prot is FREE for personal use. Excellent, easy to use, highly rated, fast DOS program for DOS, Win3.xx, Win95/98

F-Prot latest release
Download here: ftp://sunsite.anu.edu.au/pub/pc/simtelnet/msdos/virus/

ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/simtelnet/msdos/virus/

The F-Prot file will be called fp-3XXx.zip. eg fp-309c.zip
If you have ifficulty accessing the sites. Try the F-Prot homesite in Iceland:
http://www.complex.is/f-prot/mirrors.html

| A small program to automate updating of F-Prot over the net.

| GRISOFT has made AVG 6 FREE for personal use. GRISOFT has been developing Anti-Virus software for more then 10 years. The first version of AVG Anti-Virus was released at 1991. The program development center is located in the Czech Republic. AVG is a popular AV Program in Central Europe. Download here: http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_downl.cfm

| AntiVir/9x is FREE for personal use from H+BEDV. I don't know very much about this German product although I have heard talk of a tendency to high rates of false positives. Also has a FREE LINUX version.
http://www.free-av.com/eula.htm