I'm putting antivirus software on Windows 7 computers in the middle of Africa. The computers don't have internet access, but still need to be protected against viruses from CDs and thumbdrives. Separate from these computers is one computer that does have extremely spotty internet access.
What's the best AV software for this situation? The important part, as I see it, is that we need to keep the computers up to date, but can't let the AV software suck down updates at its leisure: the computers are disconnected, and getting emails onto the connected computer is a challenge enough.
We thought we might transfer update files to the connected computer using a protocol that can handle repeated connection drops (e.g. FTP with resume.) Then we'd manually apply the update files to the disconnected computers.
Does any AV software support this? Is there a better solution?
Update: Several AV systems support downloading an entire virus definition file, but that's too heavyweight to get to Africa via the spotty internet connection. We'd need support for manual downloading of incremental update files.
Best Answer
I know that AVG Free allows you to download and manually install updates, as does Spybot S&D.
Also, I don't know a whole lot about it, but this sounds like a really good application for a torrenting protocol. It is designed for this kinda thing and plus if the connection to local(internet) computers is dependable but not to computers far away(like, USA and whatnot) then this may allow you to setup an ad hoc P2P network so that when one of their computers gets the update downloaded then it can share it everywhere else without having to download it from such a remote location.