Microsoft Security Essentials on Win7

[Ziggy]

I'll give those a shot. Are they not that invasive though? XP was a nightmare for me near the end of its lifetime and I had like two programs on there, the protection was nice but it was like every other second I was having to "approve" things and whatnot haha. I'll just have to mess with these. I don't need anything fancy, but MSE is obviously doing nothing and gets below average reviews like you guys said.

Just to be clear, Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit is not an Anti-virus. Rather, it's just something you can run in addition to your AV software. As far as being invasive goes... After you install it you'll forget it's even there. That is, unless it notifies you of an attacked that it stopped.

[ExedExes]

I'll second the suggestion on MBAE. Very quiet little program that I like to install on any computers I see, especially after seeing systems compromised by any sort of seriously bad malware. The free version protects your browsers (and plugins) as well as Java, which is where much of the bad stuff happens. As it has already been said, it's NOT an antivirus, rather something that works alongside it that protects the largest vectors for any serious threats.

As far as free MBAM, I see nothing about a timetable ending on the free version. All I know is that they stopped offering the lifetime licenses on the Pro version, moving to a per year subscription.

[Ziggy]

Luckily, I bought a "for life" version of MBAM before they went to subscription.

[Xeogred]

Would you recommend MBAM then? Well, not sure I'm ready to go premium with anything yet, but I have used MBAM a lot in the past with good results for the most part. Of all the names thrown around here they're who I'm the most familiar with.

[Ziggy]

I love MBAM. I've been using the premium version along side an AV for a number of years now. It's really up to you if you think it's worth the yearly cost. At the very least, I always recommend installing the free version and doing a manual scan once a month (or however often that isn't annoying to you). It depends which camp you fall in. You got "safe browsing habits alone will keep you safe," and "the internet is a scary place, safe browsing habits alone isn't enough!" and anywhere in between.

I bought the lifetime version of MBAM when I couldn't find a free AV that I trusted 100% (I was actually using MSE at the time) so it put my mind at ease. I replaced MSE a few years back with Norton since I have a spare key every year. I know a lot of people hate Norton, but it's actually pretty good. Very light on system resources, and it's easy to "set and forget" on computer illiterate peoples' computers. I buy a 5 user key every year for family members, but only need 4, so I decided to use the 5th for myself.

[ExedExes]

Norton is better than ever and not the memory hog it used to be, every year it's even leaner than before.

You want lean, check out Webroot, what I'm using now. You could fit the installer and probably the executable on a floppy disc.

[bmoc]

You can still get a boxed retail copy of Malwarebytes Antimalware with a lifetime license on eBay. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Malwarebytes-An ... Sw9N1V3DUp

I skimmed through the seller reviews and it seems legit. It is a little over double the original price but still cheaper than a subscription.

[Xeogred]

That's pretty tempting bmoc, thanks for the link.

Just updated MBAM for another free scan and it found 21 items. Didn't look like anything too serious and that doesn't seem too bad for running on MSE mostly for a few years haha.

I'm definitely going to load up on some of these suggestions and check them out though, so thank you all for the tips.

[Ziggy]

Norton is better than ever and not the memory hog it used to be, every year it's even leaner than before.

After you configure it the way you like it, there's not much to complain about Norton. My only major complaint, as many others too, is that I wish you could have more control over the firewall.

I love the browser plugin. When you do a Google (or whatever) search, Norton will give a site rating next to each search result. Which is great because most of the time you do Google searches you won't know half the websites in the search results. Say you search for "SimCity 4 mods" and you get a bunch of sites like "coolsimcity4mods.net" that you never heard of. How do you know one of those sites don't have a drive by download waiting for you?

https://safeweb.norton.com/

Above link is a manual way of doing it, but it's also useful for when you find links for sites you never heard of on forums and whatnot, links in emails, etc.

[Xeogred]

For something different but still a bit on subject, what are some of the best bootable AV programs thesedays?

I've made a few random posts around today, but basically I have a spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse, so I randomly decided to bust out my old Win7 slim Gateway PC that crapped out on me somewhere in 2012 and 2013. I figured it was a hardware failure and something slowly dying, but then would it be a bit weird that I can still get it to boot in 2016? Albeit it literally took like 2 or more hours to get to the desktop. So it's extremely slow and broken, but I still really wish I could get answers if it was some virus that destroyed it or it's just failing hardware. I tried to do an error disc scan on the C drive, but it wouldn't let me since it was in use. Scheduling that I don't think would work.

I tried installing a new install file of MBAM to it through a USB stick, but then it told me there was some error with whatever version of MBAM I had on there. So I finally got to the add/remove program list and I couldn't even uninstall MBAM manually like that. It literally just gave me a popup that was like "Error 436" or something.

I wouldn't mind wiping the drive I guess, but I don't have any OS I can install. The Win7 I got with my new PC was some one time only OEM thing.

I've had some weird discs laying around like Dr Web Live and LSDKiller. But these are all old so I wonder what's good for booting in 2016.

I'm just rambling but anyways, this isn't an emergency at all, the computer was junk in my closet since 2013. Just figured I'd get it out to try and have some fun with it. It's just weird I can still boot and eventually get to the desktop, but everything about it seems broken and runs like sludge. Does this just happen sometimes?

Oh, it did try to do a system repair initially, but it failed that. I saw a long ass list of error code 0x0.

Wonder if I can try to download all the Windows updates on it. Wish I could have tried to get Windows 10 on that thing.