Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Maltby
Many people have been convinced that there is such a problem out there and jump to the conclusion that any performance hit must be a virus.
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I ran into one of the reasons for this just the other day. On my Toshiba, the configfree utility went wacky. I did a Google search to make sure I had all the related processes disabled to fully uninstall it, and came across many references stating "It's a virus!!!!" It's actually nothing more than a utility for "easy wifi connectivity", and completely unnecessary for most people. But when someone gets an error message on a hanging process, does a Google search, hears that it's a virus, clicks and ends up on a site that says "If MalwareBytes can't detect it, it's REALLY bad and you need to reinstall Windows"...
Granted, a virus can pretend to be a legit process (and they often do - I remember the Win Uninstaller nasty some people were hit with on XP), but many times it's just a bit of code that ran into a conflict or got corrupted somehow. It's not always the end of the world.
I used to use Avast, but switched to MSE on my Vista machines because it seems to run faster with less overhead. (My experience is the opposite on my XP machine, even with the same amount of RAM.) I also like the fact that I don't have to hear from it unless it actually needs me to do something, though to be fair, Avast now has a "game mode" that will accomplish almost the same thing.