Antivirus: Purpose of Files In Quarantine and What To Do With Files In Quarantine

[Harry]

I recently ran the AGP anti virus program. It put a lot of infectected files in what it calls a "vault." A lot of other Antivirus programs have some similar quarantine. So does this mean that these infected files are only being saved because they might be important files or are they in some way still functional. If all these files are hopeless to ever become disinfected then would it be best to just reformat your drive rather than work with programs that might have some missing files that are in the vault and are probably nonfunctional?

Is the purpose of the vault to keep the virus from spreading and allow you to restore the files should you need it temporarily for something important? But isn't the real solution to reformat. Am I right?

I stopped using Norton Anti virus years ago because I couldn't stand how much it slowed my system. That is why I now payed the price.

[Force Flow]

To my understanding, any virus picked up by virus-scanning software will place the file in an isolated place on the HDD. From there, the user can decide whether or not to total get rid of anything that may be quarantined.

btw, what kind of a system do you have where you would notice a slow-down?

[Harry]

Thanks,


I've got a 266mhz Dell Optiplex and 163 megs or ram. I've just reformatted and will now run Windows 2000 pro permanently on it instead of win98. And I will now also run AGP antivrus permanentlyt. AGP doesn't seem to hog resources as bad as Norton Utilities.

[Force Flow]

My older 300MHz system runs 98SE and NAV, and there isn't much of a difference between having it on or off.