Anti-virus for W2K

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It seems that Norton and Trend have decided that they no longer want the business of those of us that are still running W2K. The 2008 version of their A/V software requires a minimum of Win XP. Since all versions of Windows greater than 2000 contain the Registration/Activation Wizard which threatens to not allow me access to my PC and data at the whim of the Registration/Activation Wizard programmer’s bugs, I do not consider XP or Vista to e a viable option for me. Can anyone recommend a good A/V software that still supports the most recent usable version of Windows? I would prefer not to have to learn MAC again.

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AVG Anti-Virus and Internet Security is popular among Loungers – there is a basic free version and an extended commercial version.

Another popular one is Avast; free for home use.

They work on Windows 2000, but not on Windows 2000 Server.

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Thanks for the response. I don’t know anything about either of those, and I am a little leary of a “free” A/V product. Keeping up with all the scum who write viri has got to be a pretty expensive proposition, so I have to wonder how effective a “free” product is.

Anyhow, I was in a local store today and saw a copy of Kaspersky A/V on the shelf which I have at least heard of before. I picked up the box and it says it still supports W2K, so I bought a copy. I will now have to find time to get it installed in the next couple of days (I am treasurer for our church and am in the middle of year end bookkeepIng).

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Kaspersky has a very good reputation too.

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The box says they provide hourly updates!

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They do! Ask Leif – he’s been using it for years.

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We actually use a Kaspersky add-in for our mailserver and can configure it to either check on an infinitely-variable user-defined schedule – every Wed at 11:07, every Wed at 13:47, every Fri at 07:00 etc – or every x minutes since the last update. You could set it to check every 2-3 minutes if you were really concerned about getting hit by some wacko virus

Included in the subscription service to it (as part of the mailserver support), we also receive ‘alert emails’ warning of new threats which automatically trigger an update regardless of scheduling. I don’t know if this is part of the ‘standard product’ support.

For your interest, I attach the last three updates received – there isn’t always an update available. The mind boggles at the quantity of definitions available…

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I have to wonder how effective a “free” product is.

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I have been using Avast since this summer when I dumped Norton’s expensive, resource hungry product. One of the reasons I went with Avast was the similarity between the and the corporate versions of the product. Their philosophy on this is that by giving away their product to the general public (not their target market) they are better protecting their paying, corporate clients by keeping the number of viruses in the wild under control. I imagine the wider distribution allows for a much wider data collection spectrum for new virus variants to keep their database more current.

Nothing wrong with ….. as long as it’s free for the right reasons.

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One last follow up and warning. Yesterday afternoon I finally got around to Uninstalling my previous AV program which needed to be upgraded but the upgrade would not support W2K and then installing the Kaspersky AV. That was the last thing I did on my beloved W2k. When the reboot got to the point of displaying the desktop, I got a blue screen error about an unhandled interrupt and I could see the module name NTOSKRNL.EXE (the W2K kernal), and the system rebooted. That repeated over and over until I stopped it by powering off. I was able to boot into SAFE mode, so I tried to remove KASPERSKY, but when I clicked on the Change/Remove button in Add Remove Programs, Windows installer started up and informed me that it would not run in SAFE MODE. After spending 3 hours on the phone with Microsoft using MSCONFIG and DEV Manager to disable everthing in site, none of that made any difference. I then went to the local store and bought a copy of VISTA thinking that I could install that and it might solve the problem. I tried the install but VISTA install informed me that it would not upgrade from W2K to VISTA, and that if I did a new install it would wipe out all the files on my hard disk which I did not want to do before I made copies of some that had been updated since my backup of the previous night. To make a long story short, it has taken me 36 hours to get Win XP installed (I had to do a new install onto the same disk with W2K, copy off the files I needed, and then remove the disk partition and do a clean install of XP). I probably still have 3 or 4 days of work to get everything else back to where it was.

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That’s frightening. I sympathise and I hope someone can give an explanation for your misfortune and maybe prevent others suffering the same fate.

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For waht it’s worth, I’ve been using AVG on a W2k box for years. No issues. That machine also has Zone Alarm firewall.
Jeff

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In addition to the fact that it no longer supports Win2000, Norton also must be “activated”.

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Just to add my $.02…I’ve had very good results using ESET NOD32 Anti-virus protection (http://www.eset.com/products/nod32.php) on my two old W2K boxes. It doesn’t have a large resource footprint and the updates are automatic and fast. Also, most users will find that the default configurations meet all their needs; advanced users can tweak to their hearts delight. Newegg frequently has this progie on sale for around $20US instead of the regular $39.99US. Check out the free 30 day trial and decide for yourself.

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Forget Kaspersky, LegareColeman. they have already dropped Win2000 support. get AVG, avast or NOD32 as these antivirus products still work with minimum of Win2k.

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Forget Kaspersky, LegareColeman. they have already dropped Win2000 support. get AVG, avast or NOD32 as these antivirus products still work with minimum of Win2k.

Did you not notice the start date of this thread?
> Posted 2007-12-31 05:08

stuck

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