I follow a pretty good routine on scanning my PC with hlep from this site. Running AVG and Avast and ad-aware and spybot. My question is this, I am going to try Home server with up to 6 PCs and wanting to simplify the process. Is this possible? What do you seggest? Thanks again for the input!

Hi again,

Which process do you need to simplify? The anti-malware/virus routine..or something else?

Hello CR2Jones!

It sounds like you're looking for a Centralized Management point for your AV and Malware. Yes, it is possible. The bigger question is how much is this worth to you.

Many of the larger vendors, Symantec among them, offer a Centralize Management for the "Corporate Edition" of their product. Licensing is sold according to the number of PCs you will be installing on. BUT the price breaks really occur for the large companies. Small companies or individual users will still pay a premium price - maybe a dollar or 2 cheaper than retail box pricing.

Your least expensive solution would be ensure that all PCs have an autoupdating software installed and configure scans to kick off without intervention.

EDIT: Do still answer Hengis' question. That may alter my input.

I Use the avg antivirus free eddtion real time and it works great. I then run manually all the others and that is what takes all the time. Manually running another anti-virus and then the spyware. My fear is on the spyware/malware, even running two or three manually you still pick up spyware from each. I may be looking for a silver bullet but really all i would like to do is only spend a day a month doing updates/virus/spyware scanning.

Suggest you utilize something like Lavasoft's Ad Aware and Windows Defender (both freebies) to take care of the malware scans automatically.

I agree with what everyone has said. You will need something with On-Access scanning. Which essentially means, it can be deployed from the central server (either via images, or through the use of the .exe), you will be able to update it automatically and do daily scans automatically so you don't have to maintain everything on a machine to machine basis.

Some malware may get through but, not much. If you are willing to pay a little I suggest you get a corporate license for Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. This has proven time and time again in my experience (an I am sure other Security people here will attest to this too) to be the best anti-malware program I have ever used.

EDIT: Links to two softwares: Sophos anti-virus which I have seen firsthand working in IT at my school do a very good job and malwarebytes

http://www.sophos.com/
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

cr2jones,

Do you still require assistance with your issue?