TTOZ

I decided on AVG. I tried the ESET demo and the software is so complicated I thought I'd try something simpler, and I fell in love with AVG IS. I have never used any IS or AV that is so simple to operate, especially adding scanning exceptions and controlling the outbound firewall, and like ESET there is no forced VPN installed thankfully either (I use Nord). I gave ESET a good go and was reminded of this topic because I just got an email to say my ESET trial expires in 15 days. But when I get a bargain (10 PC's or phones/3 years 139 AUD total cost) like I got, I just couldn't say no. ESET is great software and I would like to point that out that it always made me feel safe and has very few false positives and on that note it is superior to what I went with, and ESET also performs slightly better overall, but it really is for power users. It took me 20 minutes to find the update settings and webcam settings, as well as trying to find application control. Those who are tech heads, I would recommend ESET over AVG for sure. For those who are old like me and need something simple, well, the choice was more difficult but I made it and I am genuinely happy so far. Also for those who appreciate good support, Eset is the best I encountered from all AV developers to this date, only the Malwarebytes team equaling ESET's incredibly quick and thorough replies. The rest, including AVG, do not even come close in that department. I did want to use the eset free scan tool as a second opinion scanner but it crashes every time I launch it, apparently that's a known thing so I gave up trying and went to MWB instead for that. Cheers all

I will start a topic it seems then to see if ESET have improved compatibility with system restore. It is more than twice the price of Kaspersky for 2 years for 3 machines right now, so I still have to think about it, but I'll see what the staff says. I am really impressed how quickly they were able to protect against such a unique threat, and that has gone a long way to me wanting to use them again. Cheers all.

Leo is a legit guy who helps us on his channel and he properly tests security software and updates us on situations like with Terminator. PC Security channel is a fantastic channel.

What happened was, I disabled ESET self protection per forum instructions so system restore could finish successfully, and it did, and then 2 minutes after the system loaded I opened ESET to make sure it was back on, and before I even got there it just hard crashed and that was it. Had to hold power button to shut down, when I powered back on I could not even get into safe mode MENU at boot, it wouldn't proceed past bios screen. Malwarebytes staff explained to me that the way the AV insert low level code throughout the system that it's entirely possible even their software could do that if really unlucky, so that's honest, but a few months before that I had a previous laptop hosed by Bit Defender which got stuck in a false detection loop and kept finding "infected" files and deleting them. I force shut down in that case too as it kept bringing up prompts about the next "infection" and when I rebooted, of course I ran 5 different offline tools and BD itself and there wasn't a single infected file. It just went crazy as I was changing folder view settings in Windows 11, not opening or downloading any files at the time. Each reply back from them took SEVEN days even after they'd apologise and promise faster responses, and this for a system with critical files corrupted deleted all over the place LOL. And then ESET were amazing with support, SO fast, but then that happened. A new, different machine hosed. So you can imagine how I felt. I went to MWB and there's been zero issue on the same machine but I SO miss an all in one suite with 2 way firewall. So BD, NO WAY. Never again in my lifetime. ESET, yeah, GREAT people, I'd love to give it a second chance. I am demoing Kaspersky now and it's OK but no where near as fast as NOD was. I made a system restore point BEFORE I installed Kaspersky, so now I can uninstall it, reboot, then run SR and it should mean zero traces. I was going to try AVG using this method as well but I really, really like and miss ESET. But I am scared. I am not trolling in any way, As much as I like them, there's that fear in the back of my mind. I don't tend to backup my OS drive. I have multiple backups of all my other drives and everything is set up so I just reinstall the OS if needed and the rest is all on the other drives including Steam games. I suppose it's something I could look into. I'd need to buy an extra drive again to do it and right now I am strapped cause the GT77 purchase ate through my savings. Cheers and thanks for the reply, sorry something similar happened to you too.

Very interesting about core isolation. It was enabled by default when I did my fresh Win 11 install but I will have to disable it if I ever want to undervolt. This MSI GT77 is known to be insane when undervolted, but to be completely honest, it's so powerful as it is (I get 32.8K Cinebench R23 and 22.3K Time Spy out of the box with no tweaks) that I think I'd rather just be safe and leave it on. But, do you mean it actually gets blocked or do you mean UAC prompts you whether to allow it or not? If it gets properly blocked then that's pretty impressive and also confusing as to why people are saying defender is the worst against terminator, when most people are not power users and would just leave core isolation enabled since it's the default (and still works when other AV are installed anyway).

SO impressive, seriously. Amazing. I think you were the very first, you detected it back in MAY! Wow

This is huge. You are therefore one of the first and one of the very few that was clever enough to at least recognize it as potentially unsafe, and I would not have allowed it had I seen a warning, as it would be something unknown to me. There is a video today of the latest kaspersky and double clicking the terminator instantly eliminates all kaspersky processes. That really put me off them. I had a really big problem with ESET last year where it corrupted my boot sector and irrecoverably hosed my entire installation, it was after a (successful) system restore. I got a refund and to be honest I was so stressed out that I just didn't want to deal with it and I shut down and disappeared from here after the refund, but if you were in my shoes I would think you would understand. Especially since it happened within the first 30 days of using the product for the first time ever in my life. The thing is now, with Eset being one of the very few clever enough to deal with terminator (and many AV don't, still to this very day)! I really am considering it all over again as I got a brand new computer a few days ago, I have done the clean windows 11 install and now it's time to find an AV suite for it. Should I start another topic about that do you think? To see if they ever worked out what happened and whether I would not be at risk of it happening a second time? I know this post is on a tangent but it's purely my hours of research today to study which AV were the quickest in dealing with such a clever piece of malware, that brought me here. THIS is the stuff that matters. Real world protection from unexpected surprises. Something I always thought Bitdefender and Kaspersky also excelled at, but it seems I was wrong, as the latter only finally blocked the driver today, more than a month after malware was in the wild, and BD still has no protection against it. So despite everything, ESET is heavily on my radar again. Furthermore, as far as actual usage goes, I liked it the most out of all. It was so light weight and a complete package and it never affected my browsing speeds in any way. That's of course if they'll even have me a second time LOL!

Yes I rebooted but the self defense setting would auto reenable so I had to disable the whole thing. Anyway, I am out, I have just been through 5 hours of hell. I am certain, certain that disabling hips completely, then rebooting, then doing a system restore hosed my windows boot area.... It was working fine when I typed my post, then 5 minutes later, I got a BSOD from the pit below when simply plugging in a brand new, empty SanDisk 32GB flash drive. I thought no big deal, I will just turn off and turn on. Windows would no longer boot even in safe mode! I tried 20 times and all it did was say your computer has encountered a problem. In all my life such a thing has never happened. Not even a repair worked from emergency menu. Nothing. It just said failed after failed. I didn't have a Win 11 USB installer and after an hour of troubleshooting to no avail, I had to wipe the drive and do a fresh install of Win 10 of which I have a retail copy. Then I downloaded the Win 11 Media creation tool and now have my win 11 installer and formatted again and did a clean Win 11 install with drivers. Computer is fine, it was just a severe boot sector corruption obviously, and the timing is too suspicious to me. Literally I had just done the restore, typed my post and the computer died. I have done hardware tests and it's all fine, and in fact now with the fresh install it is running better than ever (touch wood). I swear this is the last time I will EVER use any third party security tool. They just interject with the system at such a low level. I am thankful in a way as it happened before my 30 days, so I can refund and not be stuck with a 3 year 2 seat licenses. I won't even use Malwarebytes anymore. I am over it. Windows defender and firewall. That's it! I am done! Bitdefender hosed my system, Kaspersky slows internet on two previous computers to the point I never tried it on this one and yes I have a year license for that remaining (with this new PC), Malwarebytes was the least intrusive but also the only one to make certain games lower to 5 FPS, literally, even some old ones that are 500+ FPS otherwise, and now ESET has hosed my system. Every AV has acted like a virus for me ever since after Vet AV which was the best thing ever made. Every single person.. every single one in my audio production and gaming circles tells me to use only Defender as everything else causes issues. I finally believe it. They say, you have zero to worry about if you don't visit dodgy sites. ESET, you are fine people and I have 100% certainty, that if indeed ESET was the cause as I feel it really was, then there is no chance you'd want to do anything other than attend to it. Your support is outstanding, your product is fast and unintrusive, and I DO respect you so please don't be angry. However, I have come to the end of the road for third party AV. Currently this re install is using defender only and everything is fine. I already did an overnight DOS based memory test , extensive, last week for my 2x32GB Kingston fury impact. No issues there. I have done all the legion long tests for all components, they took HOURS, no issues there. That was after the BSOD I had last week. So I guess the proof will be in the pudding.. Will my system crash like that again? A BSOD is not supposed to destroy your entire system... and it should let you try to go to another restore point if that happens.... If my system does crash like that again, not only will I come back and apologise profusely, but I will make a donation to ESET as that would be the least I could do. Good luck to you all, best wishes, Sincerely, T PS The delay in my reply is because now that everything is finally up and running, this is the first time I am seeing it. I am just glad I use secondary drives for all game installs and stuff.

Hi, I just tried System Restore 3 times and it failed with disabling only the self defence slider. On the third time I disabled both the self defence slider and file protection and it still failed. On the 4th time I took a punt and disables HIPS completely, and thank goodness, restore was successful. I mean I had to disable the entire HIPS that requires a system restart to even disable! I was a bit concerned, but I disconnected from my network AND disabled Wi-Fi on my laptop before doing so. So there was no internet at all during this. Hence no chance of online infection. So first question, if I need to do this to ensure a successful restore in future, is that OK as long as I am offline when I do so? Interestingly, once the restore was completed, HIPS was completely reenabled and Wi-Fi on, so the exact state I created the restore in.. which is how it should work. I am letting you know in case something has changed in ESET where just disabling the one component of HIPS that I was originally told, doesn't work anymore. I must admit this is all getting a bit too much for me now.... When I used to exit Malwarebytes, which would exit all MWB processes completely, Defender came back on as a backup. Always, 100% of the time. When I disable things in ESET, security center instead shows only warnings, and it doesn't fall back to defender. The system can be in a naked state so to speak but with my previous setup it never was (and no matter what, Defender is better than nothing). An oddity was that when I opened Edge after the successful restore just now, it said that it closed unexpectedly and asked me to restore the last session, which did load OK. I have no idea why as Edge was closed when I did the restore and I had had no crashes.. But I digress... I was fooling around with HPET functions and other CPU stuff to test DPC latency and gaming performance and some stuff related to my audio production interface, and I would have been distressed had restore not worked as not everything was easy to undo, hence the restore point being made. SR has never failed me a single time, from Windows 7 days to now, when only Microsoft AV is active. I am starting to be concerned and don't know what to do. I purchased on the 25th July so I presume I am just in time to return if I decide that ESET isn't for me? Look, ESET is the closest I have come to AV happiness as an "all in one do everything package, firewall, the lot" I detest almost all the others, I did love Bitdefender total, but after the massive false positive detection loop I had that it got stuck in about 8 months back , thinking every single thing on my system was infected, and I had to force shut down to get out of it (after the screen had gone grey, with *only* BD infection popups showing, after 2 hours and clicking ok 300 times for 300 different files, I realised it was never going to end, and I decided I'd rather install the whole system again than go through any more of that, and I forced shut down with the power button) Of course, on reboot it found zero infections with a deep scan, as did defender offline and Malwarebytes full scan. Heck I even threw in Norton Power Erase. Nothing. But BD had done it's damage and deleted half the essential files on my system. A story for another time but since the first AV I used, VET, decades ago, I have never seen such a thing and it really got to me. I was devastated as I was doing nothing at the time when it went berserk. I was offline and just changing folder view options in explorer! They must have realised it was a nasty bug as they took a week to get back to me and just sidestepped everything in their reply. I loved Malwarebytes because it can truly be exited and generally is also very fast (though it needs certain game folder exceptions added unlike ESET), but I lamented the lack of integrated firewall which is why I went to ESET, to have everything in one app like BD used to be. And I researched which AV had lowest false positives, as after the BD incident that was essential LOL and ESET came out clearly on top for that, with 0 false positives in some recent tests! The legions of menus and complexity are the one thing I don't like, but if you tell me this restore thing will be looked at and attended to if needed, then that is enough for me. Also, with ESET I have had no computer performance loss, all games behave and the system is super snappy. With Kaspersky for example, it made everything lag by 2 seconds when clicking links online. There's always something. But I'll learn the functions and get used the the firewall and menus over time with ESET, as long as I can be assured I will be able to do restores. If not, can ESET be safely removed without a trace? This one was a new system, it never had MWB or others on it. ESET was the original AV install. But I still have a seat of MWB I could go back to if needed and I guess use their companion app, windows firewall control. Just a thought. Sorry for the long post!

I have absolutely no idea what is happening. I restarted the computer and now it is opening the secure browser every time I visit the bank, as per normal and with a green tick that secure browser is on. Also, I have done a FULL scan yesterday with both ESET and Emergency Kit scanner cause I was a little concerned cause it seemed something attempted a browser hijack to a legit address and ESET flashed up with red warnings and such and said it had deleted an infection and I was safe. I found the infection in quarantine It was some site called adforprocessor dot com no idea how my browser went there I guess I *may* have misspelt a letter when I manually typed the web address I *wanted* to go to, but I remember when it happened I thought it was weird. Anyway I guess it is working for now. !! I need some advice on how to create a deny rule for an app Do I start a new topic for this? I realise I just add manually but then the choices when they come up seem OTT I just want to browse for an app and choose deny net connection

Here you go and this error above happened whilst log collecting was on "Files have been collected and archived but there are warnings present" eis_logs.zip

Ok I did it, but it gets weirder.. When I enabled logging and re opened my browser and went to westpac and hit "sign in", eset popped up like normal again so I chose "secure browser always" like before and this happened The secured browser could not be started Associated error code: 0x847695d7

Ok I will do this, sorry for delay I was trying to get back my other settings, like disabling notification about windows updates, setting ESET definition update check to 30 minutes instead of one hour, and setting my home network to the trusted network (I presume I should do this for my password protected personal home router)?? it took that long to find those three settings, I have never known such a complicated program, it's starting to frustrate me. BRB

well that was stupid - I opened secure browser settings and hit default, I thought resetting it might work. But it has reset my GLOBAL settings. How silly is that when I was in the banking and payment protection section? I have now lost all my custom firewall rules, great! In any case, secure browser now prompts me for paypal.com But not for Westpac, I guess it doesn't see it as a bank anymore, and adding it manually still doesn't work. Whether ask or use secure always is selected. Re Firewall: There are certain older games that crash (for example need for speed the run) when they try connect to the net, known issue, same with Gal Gun 2, so I had enabled interactive mode JUST when I launched those games so I could set a rule to block them permanently which fixed all crashing, then I set the firewall back to auto mode. But the alerts I got was insane for the 60 seconds I had interactive mode disabled. I had to get through about 30 alerts before I got to the relevant one. Even Edge, the built in default browser needs permission. This is really poor form ESET, like little snitch on mac, you guys should have a basic set of rules that knows what essential system processes are allowed connection. And this is the first time I will say something negative about ESET. or at least an option for a set of "recommended factory rules" for example. I mean I have no idea for 95% of those things whether to allow or deny.. so I will try add the game manually this time but even creating a rule is complicated. I just want to create a "deny" rule for a certain app.. so much more complicated than windows firewall.

My main 2 sites, Westpac bank and PayPal, ESET would always ask when I entered them. For my bank I chose to permanently stay in secure browser, for PayPal I said ask. Those settings are reflected in the site settings as I just checked it. I have touched nothing other than answering those prompts, and secure browsing is absolutely enabled. I can't get it to work at all anymore! I wondered what was happening the last couple of days when the prompts for paypal stopped, and I noticed when I was entering my banking website it didn't switch browsers. So I went and I saw that banking.westpac.com.au was the site added in secure browser, so I manually added westpac.com.au in case it was that. I also set it to ask, therefore hoping I'd "reset" or "fix" it so to speak once I put it back to always secure mode. Nope, no prompts, and secure browser never auto opens anymore. Ever. If I open the secure browser manually I can use it that way, but that's not the point. I want it to be seamless for chosen sites, which is a feature of the software. Any ideas?