Is E-Trust a good anti-virus / firewall 2

[electricpete]

I had Norton 2004 suite including antivirus. I had 3 viruses in there that I couldn't get rid of. HDPlugin.exe and 00000002.exe and 000000218.exe. I think those were adware.gator and adware.hotbar (although I may be confused with my other computer... story for a different day). Tried running scan in safe mode etc and couldn't get rid of them.

I started having problems running LiveUpdate. It would download but not install. Had to run some kind of special update and it appeared to install but then later Norton says my account status is unknown (even though it didn't expire yet). I'm sure some virus was attacking Norton.

So I got rid of Norton and installed e-Trust which comes free for one year from my ISP (spyware, anti-virus, firewall, spam-blocker).

Some weird things I noticed:

1 - e-Trust never detected and deleted any viruses. e-Trust tells me no viruses found (where did they go?). Some spyware found and removed later with spyware removal tool but I'm pretty sure it wasn't those things.

2 - The e-trurst Firewall when started up individually gets permission for each and every application that accesses the internet, starting with explorere, outlook express etc. But it allowed my Windows XP update to zip right through and run an update without asking my permission. Strange, huh?

So after all this rambling I'm wondering if I did the right thing. Is e-Trust a good program?

 

[electricpete]

I forgot to say e-Trust comes from Computer Associates. I think it has a few different names EZ-Trust, E-Pest Control, EZ-Armour something like that.

 

[minxca]

Yes, it's a good software but I don't like it, i think Microsoft Canada uses it and then you know why Ms always say to disabled your anti virus when you want to install a patch/software because e-trust blocks it.

 

[kmcferrin]

I've never used it, but I know that CA makes decent products. I run Norton on one of my PCs at home (I think 2004), but the version I have doesn't do any spyware scanning. If the bugs that you had originall were spyware related, then that might have been the problem. I believe that their latest product does do spyware (most antivirus vendors do).

At home on my other PC I've also started using Avast!, because at the time it was the only thing that worked with Windows XP x64 Edition. It's not bad. It's also totally free for home use, so I have turned some of my in-laws onto it as well.

At work we used to use McAfee and it wasn't bad. The version that we had didn't scan for spyware, and when they wanted to hit us up for more fees at upgrade time we opened the bidding to several vendors. Trend Micro was the one that won out. It had antivirus, anti-spyware, and some firewall capabilities built in. I like it.

Regarding your firewall comment, Windows Update actually runs inside of Internet Explorer. I'm assuming that you had already given IE permission to hit the Internet before running the update, which is why there weren't any requests that popped up. This behavior of explicitly requesting permission for each application is good from a security standpoint, unless you don't know what applications to allow in or out. IIRC, even Norton 2004 had the same functionality (at least the Norton Internet Security package did).

Only you can decide if you did the "right" thing, but you certainly haven't done anything wrong. You've saved a years worth of antivirus subscription fees and replaced your old AV suite with a comparable product. Nothing bad about that...

 

[electricpete]

Thanks guys. The other strange thing I noticed is that Norton scanned about 180,000 files, while E-Trust only scanned around 140,000 files and said it was done.

 

[kmcferrin]

Check you scanning config. Are they both set to scan all files? Is one of them configured to skip the Temporary Internet Files? Have you possibly deleted your Temporary Internet Files sometimes between scans?

 

[BFOJ]

I use eTrust EZ Armor 2005 and recommend it to all my customers. It's a great product, up to this point, it has managed virus attacks without fail and the firewall works like a champ. I use to recommend McAfee Internet Security and Norton's Security Suite, but no longer. I'm seeing too many problems with those two products, although at one time they offered top of the line security. That's just my opinion after working in the computer support field for twenty years. I like AVG Anti-Virus and Zone Labs ZoneAlarm for those who are looking for freeware.

http://www.achristiantech.com

 

[kmcferrin]

The only thing that I didn't like about AVG is that I couldn't find any way to make it automatically update the virus definitions (or if it did have this feature enabled by default, it didn't advertise the fact). I assumed that was just one of the tradeoffs of using their free version (as it seems the pay version does have this feature).

Other than that I thought it was a good product.

 

[BFOJ]

AVG does automatically update by default. You can use the scheduler to select a time to update, as well as a time to scan. I've noticed that on machines that do not have anti-virus software or it's out of date, that AVG doesn't totally eradicate all the virus's. Some linger around and they pop up occasionally. So in these extreme cases, I recommend a good paid-for anti-virus product.

Yes, there are some who do not use anti-virus products, but most people now seem to be educated about this and run an anti-virus product. What they're not doing is protecting their computers from spyware and adware and the like. They aren't even aware until their machine is running so slow or they keep getting pop-up ads and worse.