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?

Thanks! So since the BD went wonky, maybe it's something to do with the Intel BD and Wifi drivers (killer is Intel now). Memory scan still running but so far so good. I would hate it to be the kingston fury impact ram as this laptop is a nightmare to open, but I don't think it's that from what the tests are showing PCI sys could be any driver really couldn't it?

Hi, the only difference that has been made to the machine is that ESET Internet Security was installed a few days ago. The BSOD happened when I rebooted the computer cause the Bluetooth adapter stopped working properly (the other issue that only started since ESET installed) and even though my controller was connecting to the PC, no app would see it. When I rebooted, I went down for a few minutes before I touched my touch sensor to log me in, and when I came up, it had BSOD. In other words it happened at the initial windows login screen before I had logged in, whilst it was just sitting there. I have no idea how to understand a BSOD cause. I DID rar the file but it's still 500mb (memory dump), I uploaded it to my google drive if anyone can take a look at it? Snipped: URL removed I didn't want to put this in Eset support section cause it's quite possible that ESET has nothing to do with it, just as possible as it does. It really is the only different thing on my system hence the concern. I also rebooted the system an hour later to test it, and left it at the login screen for half hour this time and no problems, whilst I mucked about with my phone LOL. When the crash occurred I was only away from the computer for 5 minutes the first time, so the second test of half an hour was much longer. PS Bluetooth and controller working fine for now after the second reboot

Hi I haven't seen a difference because there have been no infections. I presume gaming mode just supresses notifications and intrusion if something attempts to infect the system? (I mean no infections whilst gaming thus far).

Thanks but I just wanted a nice simple history somewhere in the main display like say BitDefender that just tells you "threats caught" kind of thing. Not a complex log. That said, system restore worked perfectly and I am in shock, as I have NEVER been able to do a successful restore with any other AV running, ever. Only with MWB when it was closed completely. It always failed with BD and Kaspersky, so I am really happy it worked with ESET. Anyway, I found the quarantine folder and I still don't understand what it quarantined when all I did was a google search and it quarantined something from the search result on the google page, it was the top result, but I never clicked on it, not even close! I mean I can not understand how it is removing files from links in search results that are never even pressed. I submitted it in case it was a false positive. I highlighted all files in quarantine and right clicked and removed them, and I hope that means I permanently deleted them (they were all just web links). According to Emsisoft emergency kit scanner (full scan) and ESET (full scan done after restore) my computer is clean so that's good enough for me. The only other thing I changed was to update every 30 minutes instead of hourly. I was somehow abkle to find that setting LOL. The GUI of ESET is really good, colours wise, and it's very pleasant to look at all in all. However it's a very, very complex piece of software with endless sub menus, so even that great GUI can't organise it to be really comfortable for anyone but the AV power user. So I am just going to leave everything at 99.5% default settings as I have been, and it has not changed performance in my games (in fact my timespy score for this legion 7i/3070 was 100 points higher with ESET instead of defender, 11,200 vs 11,100), so everything is basically working fine.. I tried some triple A gaming finally today, using a lot of CPU and 100% of the GPU at 140w, and there were no stutters, everything performed great. That was the final big test for me. I have decided to definitely keep it as I don't have to worry about AV for 3 years now and it has been mostly unobtrusive. Cheers and please consider that game mode toggle in taskbar menu when right clicking on ESET icon:) I very rarely game in full screen so it would be extremely handy.

Lucky LOL! I have to be honest, I am really confused, as I went to disable protection and a red thing came up and said "a threat was found and blocked a short time ago, disabling protection now will damage your computer" Where can I see what Eset blocked or quarantined.. I am finding this part (very) unintuitive The only block I remember it doing was when I was browsing in google and Eset said it blocked threats from one of the search result links.. thing is, I had not clicked on ANY search result link yet.. so I presumed Eset was that proactive it was blocking it before I could even go there LOL.. seriously it was bizarre. I'll do a scan and wait for the reply on how to view threat history and quarantine, then I have to do a restore for the first time in a few days.... Thanks as always for excellent fast support replies. Colour me impressed!

Ok I will try, do I need to use the windows recovery tools or safe mode or can I just do it from the system restore panel in normal boot mode? Also, I presume I should disable my wireless connection when I do this so nothing malicious can download to my PC? When you say pause, do you just mean to right click on the icon in the system tray and choose "pause protection" then choose pause until reboot? Also whilst I have got your attention I would really like a simple gamer mode toggle in the system tray icon options.. to have to open the program and navigate to it every time is really annoying if I am to be honest! Thanks!

With mawarebytes it was so easy, cause malwarebytes has an exit mode and a disable startup with windows mode which completely disables it and actually refers protection back to windows defender. In this mode it's as if MWB is not installed at all and not interfering with the system in any way, i.e. there are no MWB processes running, the app is completely and truly closed. Do the restore, re enable start with windows for MWB. That's it. I tend to need system restore as I beta test a lot of products for the audio community and I also muck about with certain registry tweaks and like to be able to go back to the system as it was if I need to. How can I do it with Eset installed? Thanks in advance!!

Yes I am used to Malwarebytes which is super simple and I used that in combination with windows firewall control. It was just a lot less clicks to get to firewall rules, for example, and disable or enable programs. But no big deal. I was actually a bitdefender total user but I had a nightmare scenario where it got stuck in a false positive loop (there was not actually a single infected file on my system) and hosed my entire computer. Support took a week to reply and apologised then took even longer the next time, so I uninstalled, demanded a refund, restored my computer image and have been using MWB ever since without issue. Just that on my new laptop I wanted an "all in one" so chose Eset and will put it on my desktop as well. I know it probably doesn't matter, but just for the sake of accuracy, the VPN was disabled as noted in my first comment, when I entered the forums. But now the images captcha seems to have stopped, so it seemed I just had to do it cause I was a new user. I was frustrated when I wrote this topic, sorry to everyone if I came off a bit rude, I really didn't mean it, I just panicked. Thanks again!

Ok thanks That all makes sense now ESET is very complex under the hood I see, I think I will just leave everything be and let it do its job. Cheers

Thank you for replying. Oddly no, but I do see some strange stuff that IS blocked there (I would think it's strange). The firewall is always in automatic mode. First I just want to say that after my topic, 10 minutes after, it suddenly started working and I am getting full speed downloads in Qbittorrent, so this topic can effectively be closed. I have absolutely no idea what happened but after two system restarts it seems ok. My recently blocked list is: NT Kernel and System SSDP discovery Unknown Device The laptop I am on now(!!!) My modem! I have no idea whether I should click unblock on any of these since things seem to be working. ESET says it has followed rules to block, "communication denied by rule" I am clueless honestly whether as to enable anything or not.