What is the least intrusive and most effective antivirus software for a Windows PC that is used for software development (lots of small files and lots of disk I/O)? The software should support running from the command line so that virus scan be included into the build process. Edit: I understand that prevention techniques work better than any antivirus, but the employer demands that commercial AV software be used in the development environment (looking a replacement for horrible Symantec Antivirus). Edit: I switched to the free Microsoft Security Essentials -- works great with negligible impact on system performance. No more the system freezing while new virus definitions are being installed. MSE also supports running from the command shell.
Try Clam Antivirus, it's free and non memory resident (i.e. scans on demand, not all files being opened)
it has a console also and it is very good in most of the cases
You may also wish to read http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html on why antiviruses suck and why you should use prevention techniques instead of relying on heart surgery to keep you going.
See this previous discussion:
What virus protection/internet security do you use at home as a programmer.
I tried quite a bunch of AV-Software on my development machines like ClamAV, Antivir, McAffee, ... now I'm stucked on NOD32 from Eset. It's really fast in scanning a lot of small files and has a good balance between size in memory, speed and detection-rate. When managing a lot of development-PCs Trend Micros Serversuite might be a alternative, too. It's also very frugal with it's needs and has quite a good detection-rate. But that is only true for the mentioned Serversuite, not the standart workstation version.
Eset NOD32: 32- or 64-bit free trial download
@pyalot started to hint at this, as did @Kent Fredric, but you should consider no antivirus at all.
While this is not a solution I would suggest to my mother (yet), your developers should ostensibly be technical, security-conscious, and disciplined enough to know how to protect themselves. All your developers ARE undergoing security awareness training, right??
On the other hand, if your devs are NOT reliable enough, or you want to add some protection regardless, you can deploy a gateway-AV solution - MUCH better than a desktop solution. Most current gateways (FW, proxy, etc) also support AV. Personally I'm familiar with Antigen on ISA (I think they're renamed to Forefront nowadays)...
On the other other hand (5 new fingers), if you want to insist on defusing the bomb in your living room (or a solution for my mother...), I would recommend AVG Free (I have this installed on my wife's computer - she's not ready to forgo that yet). Free, lightweight, takes up minimal memory/cpu footprint, and pretty decent (and well regarded) signatures and scanning engine.
Small update: While I absolutely still stand behind the "no AV necessary" philosophy, at least for your TRAINED programmers who should be aware of security issues regardless... I have since switched the wife's computer - and my personal recommendation for anyone who insists on having AV - to MS Security Essentials.
My work has an incredibly intrusive configuration of McAfee which destroys performance utterly. It intercepts any I/O operation and causes the whole computer to freeze while it scans the file. That said, my work came up with an interesting compromise for developers.
- Configure the virus scanner for maximum protection on the whole PC (it hurts!)
- Configure certain directories which are excluded by the virus scanner
This way we effectively get the best of both worlds because all of the development tools (IDE, compiler, databases, etc) can be installed into those "trusted" directories and run with zero performance loss. Meanwhile, the workstation is not left totally unprotected.
I've recently switched from "no antivirus" to ESET NOD32.
The only issue I've seen from a development perspective is that signing code as part of the build process using signtool.exe is incredibly slow - 30 seconds, instead of about 1.
To get round this, you can tweak some of the 'real-time scanning' configuration options, but I haven't found a good reason why this should be a problem in the first place.
Hi anheledir, Have you used nod32 commandline or the API for virus scanning ?
I've tried a lot of different AV programs and I haven't found anything better than Microsoft Security Essentials. I don't even notice that it's running.
I've used NOD 32 but occasionally it went up to 100%. That's when I decided to switch to AVAST and am still using it. It's doing alright..
This is a never endring important issue I beleieve. I've used ESET NOT32 eariler, but it had quite a lot of compability problems with other software back then at least, so I scrapped it for BitDefender. After using that for a year now, I'm ready to move on since BitDefender doesn't really let you control enough of it behaviour either (like constantly crashing PostgreSQL server if run locally and sometimes, without reason eating 100% CPU from one core for some minutes). I'm going to try Microsoft's Security Essentials now simply from the believe that if anyone can make it work optimal with their OS'es it should be them. I'm hoping I don't have to do yet another switch. How hard can it be to let the user control ALL ASPECTS of the AV software? That's all I ask...