India Broadband Forum

arvind_sampath

Hello guys!

I'm rather new to the downloading scene, so any help would be welcome. For starters, i have a few questions:

1.)I was reading some other forums, and they were all particular about having a good firewall like Peerguardian or Protowall...but this seemed more because of the tracking that anti-downloading groups are doing in US and other places. How important is it to us (in india) to have a firewall? And if it is important, please suggest the best.

2.) Do these work for e-mule too? Or does it need something else? Also, any other tips from users of e-mule will be very helpful.

3.) i read elsewhere in this forum that McAfee is useless...could someone please elaborate?

Thanks in advance.

FYI: I'm on a BSNL UL900 plan, and currently have only McAfee installed for protection.

superprash2003

AVG is a good antivirus..Zonealarm is a good firewall.Im sure many would say norton,kaspersky,nod32,avast etc etc etc .. the list is endless.Dont worry about it.Just go with any one it will do the job for you.As long as you regularly update your antivirus.

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arvind_sampath

thanks superprash for the help!

i guess i'll just stick with McAfee as of now....

zonealarm is something i'll have to look into though.

thanks!

lightgreen49

for antivirus go for kespersky ( it's comes with a firewall and is free too)
mcfree use a lots of memory and slows down the internet else wise it is good

but as a BSNL UL900 user u must have concern for speed (only 256 kbps is what i get here) and if u try more antivirus online it may slow down u further!!

arvind_sampath

hey lightgreen!

thanks for the tip about kaspersky...but i guess i'll stick with McAfee, as it hasn't done anything wrong for me until now. as far as the speed is concerned, it's ok, a few kbs here and there won't kill me...and besides, i'm on almost 24/7, so i think i make up..

just4kix

And of course, do not install two AV softwares at the same time - they may conflict. McAfee is good - be sure to keep the McShield Service running and also keep the AV definitions up to date.

arvind_sampath

thanks just4kix!

gives me a big sigh of relief!

just one thing though...when you talk about keeping the AV definitions up-to-date, you are talking about the automatic updates that the AV (McAfee in this case) itself goes in for, every time i connect to the net, right? or are there some other updates that i need to manually make to it, over and above these?

also, your input on firewalls like peerguardian. so many people all over the net seem to swear by them. are they really necessary? i'm really concerned about complicating things too much, and having this firewall interfere with McAfee, and then with some p2p clients, and all that. i want to keep things uncluttered and simple, but safe at the same time. so what do i do?

just4kix

Yes. I was talking about McAfee automatic updates. Nothing more.

If you have McAfee and Windows Firewall that should be good enough. I too don't like too many services running on the machine - unnecessary resource hog. I run Windows Firewall and that is enough for me.

arvind_sampath

thanks for resolving that!

another thing if you don't mind, is: many people talk about running an AV check through everything you download, before you save it into your hard drive. but this check is something AVs like McAfee do automatically if they are running, right? it's not something i have to do manually for each file, is it?

thanks again.

just4kix

With McAfee "On Access" scan running, it is not required to manually scan each and every file.