paranoid protection??

Taking a look through Maleware removal I came across a couple of statements that concerned me, 1st A.V.G Free may be the reason my machine is running a bit slowly and could be considered to be bloatware. I regularly use my Super-antispyware my Malware-bytes and my Ccleaner, I have also started to use Dweak. On top of this I have installed Sophos I am running Windows XP Service Pack 2. 32 bit version I am wondering if 1 I should change to a different AV say Antivir Personal Edition or Comodo. Have not decided as yet and would welcome your advice.
2nd I noticed that there is a concern over the use of Myway. One of my friends uses this for his email and has it as his home page, which, by the way, is hijacked on regular basis. Idea’s on a postcard please.
Am I being paranoid about my protection?

 

Tony.
My personal choices that haven't let me down are:
Comodo Firewall
Avira AntiVir
SuperAntiSpyware
MalwareBytes
SpywareBlaster
WinPatrol

 

You should update to Service Pack 3 as well.

 

Also, probably quite a few updates after this is installed.

 

Hi Tony,:wave for sure, update to SP3, then LOTS of updates that follow that. I use AVG 9 Free, and PC Tools FW Plus myself, and have had no problems myself, BUT, I am on a dial-up network, and that is my personal opinion.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I do update daily, and scan frequently. I haven't noticed any "slowness" and the AVG 9 Free v. works the same as my Trend Micro did. I think it is a decision you may have to make yourself.

Plus, how much free space will you gain, by changing AV's? I know my AVG 9 is a lot smaller than the Trend Micro I had on here before.

 

Yes, you had better update, lots of security implications involved.

As for AVG, if you have a system with under a gig of ram, then I would uninstall same, and reinstall using the "custom" install option.

Then you will be given a decision tree, uncheck all boxes but the top one, which is for the virus shield. The other boxes are for email scanner, MS Office products, link scanner, and additional language support; none of which are really any good anyway but they do chew up resources.

Does this give you sufficient protection? For the most part, yes, until you elect to download some stuff that looks really neat. I tell my students to ONLY download from here, MGs, or Microsoft, unless you are absolutely, 100% certain that the other download is safe! And if you do a search for any desired applications here at MG, you will probably find it. And IT WILL BE SAFE!

I manage a bank of computers, mostly XP, using this approach, and have yet to run into a major problem.

Following seas to you!

 

And as to the title of this thread, to me there is no such thing as being too paranoid about security for your personal information and data.