I saw that a moderator (somewhat recently) posited that Webroot and McAfee are “essentially the same except Webroot is a smaller company.” I politely beg to differ; no, they are not. I became familiar with McAfee in 1995, and immediately determined the application to be completely unsuitable due to the fact that it demanded so high a percentage of system resources that not only could no other application be used, but the AV program could have easily have been outpaced by a chilly snail. I did not try that application again for several years.
I became acquainted with Webroot’s product line in 2001, and was immediately impressed…however not sufficiently enough to eschew a wide range of free AV/Malware solutions available at the time. Twelve years ago I was hit with a truly NASTY virus that targeted my keyboard’s output. I tried every “popular” big-name contender (and there were a LOT), and all of them presented one of two equally unacceptable problems:
- They either could not even IDENTIFY a threat, or
- They had NO idea how to repair the damage or remove the hostile invader.
I installed Webroot, McAfee having already failed miserably, and not only did it nearly IMMEDIATELY identify the saboteur, it arrested him, kicked his sorry butt out, and cleaned up neatly after him. Although Webroot was more costly than McAfee, I purchased a top-tier license and haven’t regretted it since. There are several advantages users of Webroot enjoy over those of McAfee, chief among them that Webroot actually successfully detects a greater percentage of threats, and those that it does detect, it has no problems whatsoever removing them…unlike McAfee.
Here this thread becomes germane to the topic at hand:
Not only does Webroot have far fewer false positives [having never identified WeMod or any of its trainers as threats to my system], it doesn’t have the really annoying and inconvenient habit of automatically quarantining them and then hiding them…as I’ve seen McAfee do. Getting a positive identification on a threat, a messagebox pops up. Morons and idiots reflexively OK past it without examining the threat’s credentials. I, however, instruct Webroot either to Allow or Monitor the “threat,” and I am never bothered again concerning the file that has been proven by experience not to be a threat. Not one single file that I have whitelisted has ever bitten me on the butt.
Since I started buying Webroot, I have been hit with a virus ONCE, and IT was identified and removed less than an hour later, definition updates being quite frequent. The only false positives I have gotten courtesy of Webroot has been other trainers whose behaviors were flagged, not the files themselves. Many trainers behave in some of the ways that viruses behave, and I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen WeMod users complain, “This trainer has a virus!”
Well, I don’t know what protection they were using, but Webroot has never done that to me with any trainer launched by WeMod.
Oh, and in case any of you reading this are using a free threat solution, or even a combination of them, you’re more than ten years too late to catch up with the times; those free solutions will cause you terrible heartache. I guarantee it.
-Gamer since 1978