I currently use spybot and Avg anti virus. Is clamwin equal to these programs or better?

ClamWin probably has a better signature database than Spybot, but Spybot has a real-time scan capability that ClamWin does not have. ClamWin does not scan your computer when files are added or changed--only when you do a manual scan or a scheduled scan. The free, open source Clam Sentinel project at https://sourceforge.net/projects/clamsentinel/ on the web enables real-time scanning with ClamWin and adds its own heuristic scan engine to detect malware for which ClamWin does not yet have signatures. ClamWin with Clam Sentinel together probably provide protection equal to or better than Spybot.

As for AVG, it is better than ClamWin--even with Clam Sentinel. AVG is a well-funded commercial company with millions of dollars per year in revenue, lots of paid employees, several locations world-wide, and a continuous development process. There is no way that ClamWin amd Clam Sentinel can compete with it. The Clam Win and Clam Sentinel projects, between them, are run by 3 developers in their spare time, with occasional help from a very few volunteers. Clam AV (now a commercial company) is still kind enough to let ClamWin use its virus signature database and scan engine, so ClamWin does benefit from any Clam developments that can be ported over from Clam's Linux operating system to ClamWin's Windows operating system. The only advantage ClamWin has over AVG is that it is more responsive to its users than AVG. Both ClamWin and Sentinel could benefit from more volunteers, funding, and more user participation in testing and suggestions for improvements.

Regards,

Another advantage ClamWin/Clam Sentinel have over AVG (and Avast also) is that they have not outsourced their customer support to a questionable Indian company that pushes additional "features" (similar to fake antivirus software) on users. See https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/03/aghast-at-avasts-iyogi-support/#more-14120 on the web for a report on this.

Regards,

I think clamwin has an advantage over AVG and a huge advantage over Norton in that the other products with their real time scanning can slow down your computer. If you are an experienced user that knows a little bit about how to stay out of trouble, clamwin can scan at night when idle rather than slow down your computer with every operation. This is especially useful for laptops that often are not powerful enough to run every thing we want to run.

I run netbeans on my netbook which really taxes the cpu, and clamwin is better for my netbook because I don't need a virus scanner stealing cpu time for real time scanning while I am using netbeans to eddit projects that may consist of dozens of files that all need to be rendered with netbeans and the java stack in a variety of interpretations including html, css and php.

but I digress ...

You do not have to scan every file or folder on your computer. Most malware is in a Windows folder (usually system 32) or Users/Documents and settings folder. You also do not have to scan every extension. Most malware will be found in a Windows executable file or in a few other extensions (usually web-related). Here is what I scan with ClamWin and Clam Sentinel:

ASP,.ASPX,.BAT,.BIN,.CLASS,.CMD,.COM,.CPL,.CRT,.DLL,.DOC,.DRV,.EML,.EXE,.FLV,.GZ,.HTM,.HTML,.INF,.JAR,.JOB,.JS,.JSE,.LNK,.NT,.OCX,.PDF,.PHP,.PIF,.PPT,.RAR,.REG,.RTF,.SCR,.SWF,.SYS,.TMP,.VBE,.VBS,.WSF,.WSH,.XLS,.ZIP.

This speeds up my scans, and I think it provides about 90%+ coverage of malware I am likely to have. It takes ClamWin about 30 minutes to scan my 160 MB laptop. Clam Sentinel also scans faster in real-time with 43 extensions instead of the 120 or so default extensions.

By the way, ClamWin will still scan any extension if you right clck on a file to do a manual scan.

Regards,