Boss, your AVG may have stopped working because they changed it all around about 3 years ago. It is now only available as a "suite" of protection products, and there is no more free version to be had, I believe.
I would recommend staying away from Spybot Search and Destroy. It
used to be a pretty good program, but that was quite a few years ago. It may still work for some people, but on both my Dell PC's it would lock the whole rig up solid if I tried to use the program's own updater while it was running. (One Dell was Win 98SE and the other is Win XP.) The only work around was to get the new definitions file and then drag and drop it into the program folder. I uninstalled it, then retried it much later when there was a "totally new" version available. It was even worse, nothing but total lockups, so I ditched it.
Also, the "tea timer" anti change feature was a total and complete pain in the *** because it would start squawking each and every time you made even the tiniest little change to
anything in your system. I shut that "feature" off long before the lock up problem surfaced.
If you would like to get a good free anti virus, I would recommend trying
Avast!
Avast! consistently ranks up near the top of the heap when anti virus programs are being tested. And best of all, it is still free. I have been using this one for at least four years, and it works great.
Two other programs to consider are "Spyware Blaster" which operates by blocking spyware before it can get in, and Ad Aware which is a nice anti root kit and spyware removal program. Both have free versions.
You might also consider A squared Free. This one has been changed recently. I think it has been seriously nerfed, since they want you to buy the pay version. But it has still found 2 or 3 things the others missed, so I keep it on my system.
With sensible surfing, and these 4 free programs, I have been problem free for years.
Spware Blaster is nice, because you just update it once a month and it runs quietly in the background.
Every night when I go to supper I do a scan with one of the other 3 programs. If I go out for the afternoon, I run a "deep scan" on one of them. By the time I get back, it's all done.
) im going to take namlesses advice for the time being and go grab avast i believe for the time being but if that doesnt work out then im going to invest in one. So im going to redo all the scans mandrake suggested earlier in the thread and then preform a scan with avast, then ill give it another week or so and report what i find.
