Disable virus protection?

[plutarch]

What the hell is wrong with you people making this suggestion? This is a ridiculous suggestion as it tells people to use their PC without basic protection. I don't tell people to drive their cars without seat belts. I don't encourage them to leave the bullets in the gun while cleaning it.

I work for a major anti-virus vendor and it is silly to encourage this. You also don't encourage them to re-enable protection AFTER they are done playing. What happens if their PC is hit with a worm while playing Civ4? It is very irresponsible to encourage someone to disable anti-virus software.

IF you want to make a performance-related change tell people to place an exception in the On-Access Scanners for the Civ4 Directory. Put that exclusion in to exclude writes from the "c:\program files\firaxis games\" directory. You can tell folks to make sure a scheduled (On Demand Scan) isn't going to occur while you're playing a game. But do not tell them to turn off virus scanning ever.

 

[warpstorm]

This is very good advice, plutarch.

 

[MrCynical]

I think most of the recommendations are just to turn off virus protection for installing Civ 4, where it was causing some of the problems. This is perfectly reasonable since you can just unplug the internet connection for this, and is rather simpler than messing round in the antivirus settings.

A few people (and possibly Take 2?) have also suggested this for playing Civ 4 though, which is of course idiotic in the extreme.

 

[Alan_Bernardo]

What the hell is wrong with you people making this suggestion? This is a ridiculous suggestion as it tells people to use their PC without basic protection.

Viruses are over-blown, the need for protection, while there, is exaggerated. I have a virus program on my computer but it is not activated. In almost 30 years of computing, I've contracted one virus.

I'll take my chances. The bad of virus programs (ironically enough)outweighs the good.

Vendors of anti-virus programs make it appear that every single blessed user of a computer needs an anti-virus program running in the background. That is simply untrue. I do have a router, which provides me with a firewall, which is about all I need.

Anti-virus vendors are so much like insurance salesmen: the chances of getting a computer virus are about as much as the chances of a tree falling through my house roof.

I'll take my chances, and avoid the trouble anti-virus programs cause.


Alanb

 

[kattana]

>Viruses are over-blown, the need for protection, while there, is exaggerated. I have a virus program on my computer but it is not activated. In almost 30 years of computing, I've contracted one virus.
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i would have to agree with this, but with one caveat...its ALL about the user.

most users just simply dont practice safe computing. pure and simple.

i myself have my internal home network behind a NAT firewall router, and my own personal system has never had a virus from me...but low and behold i let someone else use it for a minute..bam..they go to unknown joe blow web site looking for a free mp3..thanks friend..had to reinstall windows

so you see..AV for some of us is not needed..we know that opening that file isnt really going to let us see some hot babe naked, nor is the FBI tracking where i go..though if they did, they might learn a thing or 2 about computers and the world around them.

but for the masses using computers, any common sense they may have seems to go out the window as they hit the power on button.

on a side note: the other thing i just LOVE seeing is gaming companies suggesting and showing people how to punch holes in their firewalls so that they can do stuff like patch or network game...yeah..thats smart to do too...

 

[Grogs]

Viruses are over-blown, the need for protection, while there, is exaggerated. I have a virus program on my computer but it is not activated. In almost 30 years of computing, I've contracted one virus.

If you're a technically competent, thorough, and careful PC user, this may be the case most of the time. By not doing the things that get your computer infected (and let's face it, 95%+ of viruses are still acquired by opening a file you shouldn't) you can minimize your chance of infection. There's still a chance though that something can slip through - there are millions of haXors out there and odds are they can figure out a back-door I've never even dreamed of.

Most people aren't that competent technically, and they're not willing to go through the added trouble that closing security holes entails. Virus scanners, while not perfect, can minimize the risk to these 'average joe's.'

Also, you've obviously never seen the damage a virus can potentially do. As a network admin, I saw quite a few. One in particular I remember overwrote every single document (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) on the computer with 0's. That data was just gone (no undeleting something like that) so people lost years worth of work. Another example, my parents got a virus recently. I had set them up with pretty decent security (Norton AV w/ autoupdates, a router, and automatic Windows Updates) but I couldn't keep them from opening dangerous attachments :shakehead It wasn't particularly harmful in itself, *but* it immediately downloaded about 6 other viruses, disabled the virus scanner, etc. All told, it took me about 12 hours to clean it out. If the virus designers had been more competent (they disabled NAV, task manager, and a few other things, but they left backdoors around it) I may have had no option but to reload the system.

 

[plutarch]

For those of you who are smart enough to simply "avoid" viruses I am sure you can be safe without hearing any propaganda or bluster from me. You guys already know the racket we have set up to get you to buy stuff. I know you're just too smart. So I won't bother. If you're really smart, keep doing what you're doing and I'm sure everything else will be fine. You can keep riding motorcycles without helmets and riding in cars without seat belts.

-----------

And on one point you're entirely correct: We sell insurance. Or more closely we mitigate risk. I acknowledge this to all of my customers (I deal with customers who have 5000+ systems to protect). They have a business to run and we're not that business. We simply protect it.

For your typical end-user there are basic safe computing measures that need to be observed:

1. Run Anti-Virus (it doesn't matter whose)
2. Use a NAT device between you and your ISP
3. Use a software-based Firewall with Host Intrusion Prevetion
4. Use passwords
4b. Change your passwords at least occasionally
4c. Write them down and put them in a desk at home. Chances are if someone breaks into your house you have bigger problems than passwords.
5. If you don't know what the question in the pop-up is asking then always answer "no".
5b. Ask your nerdy friends what the dialog means. We'd rather help you with the question BEFORE you are infested with spyware.

The nature of blended threats out there is such that it is a good idea to practice some safe computing.

 

[Gailainne]

I would suggest that you never click on a button on a pop up window,yes or no, either right click delete on your tool bar or click on the top right X.

 

[Mirc]

I disable my protection while playing, otherwise it gets stuck on Small maps.

 

[kattana]

>You can keep riding motorcycles without helmets and riding in cars without seat belts.


LOL...statements like that always crack me up...

aye those devices *may* save your life, but it doesnt make them any safer to drive...they dont prevent the accidents from happening in the first place.

and as for motorcycles..LOL any accident over a minor bump at less than 10 miles an hour and your pretty much screwed anyways

anyways..thats a bad analogy because a good AV system can prevent a end user from getting infected...it doesnt make it any safer once they are infected though..

 

[m15a]

if you're playing single player, you can always disconnect your internet when you play civ 4. just remember to turn it on afterwards, and there shouldn't be an issue.

i see what you're saying, though, OP. don't necessarily agree with attacking those few sentences of suggestion so harshly, but sure, people can misunderstand what's being said there. but then, who's fault is that if they screw up? (like if a friend tells me they screwed up their computer, i say reformat. it's not my fault if they didn't know to backup their files before formatting. sure, if you're calling a tech help line they should do that. but this case i think is somewhere in between.)

a related question: are there certain virus protection programs that are less resource hungry?

 

[Grogs]

anyways..thats a bad analogy because a good AV system can prevent a end user from getting infected...it doesnt make it any safer once they are infected though..

anti-lock brakes then.

Plutarch: You forgot #6 - Have a good spyware protection program and run it regularly. One of the chinks in the armor of antivirus programs is that they can't stop brand-new viruses that aren't in their database yet. While Ad-Aware can't remove viruses, it will often pick up on something wrong even though Norton didn't detect a virus on my system. For example, you may get a virus that adds the hacker's website to the 'trusted' group in IE, at which point your computer will pretty much give full access to that site. It's also good for stopping the (slightly) less malicious spyware/malware components that you pick up if you're not careful surfing.

 

[Psyringe]

The OP does give good advice. It would have been just as good if it hadn't been brought across as an over-generalizing collective reproach against a whole group of forum users who, after all, just try to help other people to run the game. A simple informed suggestion instead of a rant might have been received better.

 

[syneris]

Viruses are over-blown, the need for protection, while there, is exaggerated. I have a virus program on my computer but it is not activated. In almost 30 years of computing, I've contracted one virus.

I don't run any antivirus software or a firewall (If behind a router, I'm set as DMZ host.) The only virus i've ever gotten was a nimda32 variant. It was a new variant so neither of my roommates AV software noticed it before i saw weird files poping up in our shared folders. Kind of like the same reason I don't lock my car when i go downtown. If someone wants to steal my radio, I don't want to replace it along with the window they broke to get into my car.

 

[Mirc]

I agree with you. But just a joke: The reason you THINK you had only one virus is that you don't have an antivirus.

 

[jcikal]

I do use Anti-Virus software on my PC and so far, it's detected 3 viruses in the last 5 years I've been using it. Even now with my kids (7 & 8 yrs old) logging into the web, it's never encountered any viruses yet. I for one do reccomend that you do use a virus protection program. Before I play a game on my PC, I always disconnect my Internet connection and disable my Virus program. After I'm done playing or if my wife/kids needs to connect to the web, I restart my computer before getting on the Internet again. If you are the kind of person who forgets to reboot before accessing the Internet, you're better off NOT disabling or turning off your Anti virus program. I don't know if it's OK or not to mention a particular program so I won't mention which one I use, but it's one that professional computer service companies use to remove viruses from computers so I do feel a big level of comfort using it. And remember the old saying: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

 

[Ardeshir Shah]

I'd be happier about running antivirus software if on-access scanning and other periodic scanning scripts didn't absolutely devour all my CPU cycles. My campus network requires invasive antivirus programs, and before I figured out how to bypass their enforcement software and turn it off my computer would crash to a halt for a few seconds every minute as the antivirus monster tore through all my other processes to do whatever it did. Without it, my computer is much smoother and I still haven't gotten any viruses.

 

[plutarch]

Plutarch: You forgot #6 - Have a good spyware protection program and run it regularly. One of the chinks in the armor of antivirus programs is that they can't stop brand-new viruses that aren't in their database yet. While Ad-Aware can't remove viruses, it will often pick up on something wrong even though Norton didn't detect a virus on my system. For example, you may get a virus that adds the hacker's website to the 'trusted' group in IE, at which point your computer will pretty much give full access to that site. It's also good for stopping the (slightly) less malicious spyware/malware components that you pick up if you're not careful surfing.

I don't disagree with you; however, many of us AV vendors update our content (i.e. virus/malware definitions) much more frequently than anti-spyware vendors. However, the "*****" in the armor isn't that we don't protect against zero-day attacks (we do and we do a darn good job of it). The ***** is that the whole AV industry basically ignored spyware as "not really a virus" until roughly 12 months ago. Since then we've all basically declared war on spyware because our large corporate customers wanted us to do so.

One little note: There are only eight companies that actually do anti-spyware research and provide engines + content. Everyone else buys engines and content from one of those companies. My recommendation to you would be to find a tool that is one of the core companies.

My request is this: Let's all stop telling people to "Disable Virus scanning". That's a really bad idea.

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EDIT: Well that's odd. Obviously, I'm not allowed to use the word c-h-i-n-k even though a previous post uses that same word in plural form. I know seeing the asterisks is annoying and wasteful of asterisks. So from now on when I want to use a bad word, I'll use a synonym. From now on I'll use the word "liberal". For example: "Liberal you! You liberaling moron! Go to liberal!" I hope the substitution will be abundantly clear to the reader and I hope it will prevent a shortage of asterisks in the future in case someone should need one for a real emergency. Have a nice day and a Merry Christmas.

 

[warpus]

thing is that some people use totally overbloated anti-virus packages like norton.

norton sucks.. it uses way too much memory than an anti-virus package should.

i use nod32 myself. while most people have never heard of it, i never have to worry about it using up too much memory or stealing cpu cycles.

so i can totally see how someone not knowing much about computers, running norton in the background, might have performance issues w/ civ4.

 

[Underseer]

What the hell is wrong with you people making this suggestion? This is a ridiculous suggestion as it tells people to use their PC without basic protection. I don't tell people to drive their cars without seat belts. I don't encourage them to leave the bullets in the gun while cleaning it.

I work for a major anti-virus vendor and it is silly to encourage this. You also don't encourage them to re-enable protection AFTER they are done playing. What happens if their PC is hit with a worm while playing Civ4? It is very irresponsible to encourage someone to disable anti-virus software.

IF you want to make a performance-related change tell people to place an exception in the On-Access Scanners for the Civ4 Directory. Put that exclusion in to exclude writes from the "c:\program files\firaxis games\" directory. You can tell folks to make sure a scheduled (On Demand Scan) isn't going to occur while you're playing a game. But do not tell them to turn off virus scanning ever.

I had McAfee VirusScan 8.0i installed on my computer.

If I wanted to play multiplayer in Civilization 4 or Dungeon Siege 2, or if I wanted to use the multiplayer features of either game to automatically update to a new patch, I had to disable my antivirus program. There was no other way.

I finally solved my problem by uninstalling McAfee and installing the Windows OneCare beta.