I’m looking for an antivirus that will scan zip files and detect viruses before they harm my new computer. I have AVG already. Do you have any suggestions?
Chosen Answer:
AVG FREE Anti-virus 2011 or 2012 are just fine. You do not have a vulnerability with AVG since it will scan any file BEFORE ANY program on your computer can load or read it.
What you are over looking is that zip files are compressed. Because they are compressed it is impossible for any anti-virus program to detect virus’s contained in them since the data in the files are UN-intelligible. By un-zipping a zip file, all of the files contained in it will be extracted and decompressed and written to disk as individual files. Only then can an a-v program scan them for virus’s.
The un-zip process itself is not in any danger from any virus’s that might be contained in the zip file.
By design, AVG a-v FREE always scans files at the time that any program does the open function, before the program itself actually reads the file. That is how all real-time anti-virus programs work.
So you are perfectly safe already.
If you want an extra early detection of virus’s that might arrive on your computer from a zip file, then use windows explorer on the entire folder created by un-zipping.
An easy way to do this is to use windows explorer to open the un-zipped folder, select all files in the folder
(click on any file in the folder, then press the CNTRL key plus the ‘A’ key. That should hi-light all of the file names. ).
Next right click on one of the files, then click on ‘SCAN with AVG ‘
by: SES
on: 28th July 12