On Sun Nov 28 7:35 , 'Rony Bill' ronbilly@hotpop.com sent:
An antivirus detects viruses after they enter the system and get resident. Many of my clients are home users so the comp is used by the kids too and they have their own choices and uses which are difficult to implement in linux. They are used to the standard programs.
That's not quite correct. The two most popular AV solutions, Norton & McAfee, both check files as soon as they are accessed. A file being downloaded from the network is scanned before being saved onto the disk. Executables are also scanned before they are run. I'll give you an example.... some years ago, I installed WinMe & NAV2002 on a friends PC. I updated the AV using the live update feature of NAV. Several days later during an online chat with him over ICQ, as a prank I sent him Sub7 trojan client, under the garb of it being a game. The download completed and the file then promply disappeared. It ended up in the quarantine folder of NAV instead of the specified folder.
Vivek