McAfee v Norton AntiVirus

What's wrong with freeware?

I can't comment on McAfee or Nortons - but I have been using Trend Micro PC-Cillin on one of my PCs for the last year - the licence is due to expire at the end of April and I won't be paying for antivirus software again.

On another of my PCs (the one I really give a damn about, actually) I used freeware - AVG Free.

I found the Trend Micro product updates were huge. This morning the update was 3 MB. I think there were only a couple yesterday - around 0.5 MB.

AVG Free updates are very small.

No problems with either. Oh, and I don't rely on antivirus software for spyware protection. You can get much better spyware protection for free.

Why don't you pull down the AVG Free antivirus software and install it on one of the laptops - then test it out?

There is a test site for antivirus software that can tell you a bit about how well your AV software is working:

http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm

AVG everytime

AVG for me and zone alarm for a firewall, both have been flawless.

I would not install norton on my enemies computer.

as pery iGary, I wouldn't wish Nortons on my worst enemies (if I had any) ... from bitter experience. apart from being bloatware, it totally f*#ks up your machine. the last straw for me was uninstalling it from a win2k machine, following all the regedit instructions from Nortons website, calling their helpline... the only way to eradicate it was a complete rebuild of the machine. Wholly unaceptable.

Antivirus: I've been using AVGFree for about 4 years now, I find it wholly satisfactory.

Firewall: Zonealarm (for all it's issues) works fine as a client-side firewall... all my machines reside behind a smoothwall box for major firewall protection.

Malware: I've been using that free one... I forget the name of it, it's by some guy in germany who dedicates it to the most beautiful girl in the world. very effective, and clearly memorable. Can anyone help out here?

If you want an all-in-one package, friends of mine have had great success with bitdefender.

AVG for me too.
I wouldn't touch Norton with a bargepole. First thing I did when one of the kids got a new laptop was to uninstall Norton & get AVG.
Matt.

Another vote for AVG, Zone Alarm and Spyware Blaster. All freebies.

Zonealarm pro is very good (much better than the ZA freeware)

Running real time antivirus isn't realy needed and can be a nightmare with folder access and shares contention with other programs.

Trend micro have a free web AV scan which I use regularly; HouseCall; Never had anything but I follow strict web protocols which I don't see many customers with AV installed doing(false sense of security)

Avoid Norton it is bloat and badly coded.

ANyway if you were to get a trojan or virus then the exe would be caught by a good firewall like ZA and you would then be in the possition to refuse it acccess to run.

Seven years and virus-free, highly recommended:

NOD32 by ESET

I use Avg Professional, but here's a link to the free version.

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/avg-anti-virus-free/lng/us/tpl/v5

Lava soft Ad-Aware which is free, to get rid of ad-ware.
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

CCleaner which is free and highly recommended.

http://www.ccleaner.com/update/?v=1.38.485&l=1033

Running ZA - have used both Mcafee and Norton, and za runs the pc much better imv...

I think ourdays Kaspersky is better than McAfee

Isn't a Mac owner going to recommend that Don disposes of the laptops and get Macbooks?

The thread will not be complete without it.

Another vote to say DO NOT install Norton, Symantec protection software once it's in it's very difficult to get rid off.

Better than nothing but AVG, Zone Alarm, AdAware are better with less bloat and can be removed much more easily and do not mess up your machine. This is a shame as originally these used to be good products but now I would not touch them with a barge pole.

Well, Don, we meet again. Let's see if communications proceed more easily.

Bottom line: CA-eTrust or, perhaps, Norton 2007 (not 2006 or earlier) for AV, with the edge going to CA, which is perverse because when I used their mainframe software, they were a truly dspicable company.

CA is my top choice because:

1) daily updates - if the timestamp isn't today's, you know you have a problem;
2) not intrusive, relatively speaking, of course
3) I've put it on at least 30 PCs. A problem requiring a second visit has occurred in only 1 of them. Maybe 70% of the Norton PCs my clients use need repeated service calls. (Symantec AV Corporate edition is a very good product, however.)
4) It's free for 12 months for home use (makes the charge for the service call easier to justify).

Thumbnails

I've always found McAfee to slow down my PC usage unpredictably, which is really annoying.

Norton AV had become increasingly bloated and intrusive over the years, but reviews indicate the 2007 version has slimmed down and become a lot less intrusive than it was last year. It may have become a good choice again, and it's well priced for 3 PCs. I don't see how the company could have improved, though - I've billed a lot of hours first trying to get their Liveupdate to work consistently. Then I realized my clients would be better served by removing NAV and installing CA's product.

I find the 'in the wild' tests at www.virusbtn.com compelling. Trend-Micro is not in the top rank in those tests so I don't recommend it often...which is perverse, come to think of it, because I recommend and use Trend-Micro's online scan.

My own PCs are protected by either Symantec Corporate or CA-eTrust. For free copy go to http://home3.ca.com/SubscriptCenter/MSTrialRegistration...?cid=1855&lang=en-US. It's very efficient, certified, and a virus bulletin 100% product.

ZoneAlarm used to market CA's AV product and package it with their firewall as a security suite, but I think they moved to Kaspersky, which was at one time a very good product for medium to large businesses. If they did, it should be very good on home PCs, too, but it's not as easy to use as CA.

Anit-Spyware

A few years ago, Ad-Aware fended off a lawsuit by agreeing to leave some major spyware products intact; I no longer use or recommend it.

If I suspect spyware, I now place my trust in online scans. Generally it's faster, cheaper, better for my clients to reformat and reinstall software than to wow them with my technical expertise.

The current crop of AV products have reduced the prevalence of spyware, but I still have some faith in Spybot S&D and its immunization facility.

For firewall, here's another vote for the free ZoneAlarm. It's not as robust as ZA Pro, but it causes fewer problems, and it's better than most home users need.

Regards.

Phil

To Don A.:

I'm against the death penalty, too.

However, I must admit there is one set of offenses for which I would support torture, judicially-approved death, and any other manner of horrible-ness.

That is, there is no punishment too great for those who commission, write, exploit, and/or knowingly distribute malware.

Regards.

Phil

quote:

That is, there is no punishment too great for those who commission, write, exploit, and/or knowingly distribute malware.

On some things we can all agree.....

Cheers

Don

quote:

Originally posted by dave simpson:
Seven years and virus-free, highly recommended:

NOD32 by ESET

I can also vouch for NOD32 - no complaints at all. Nor does it seem to hog the CPU like norton.

My sincere thanks to all who provided advice and recomendations.

I am going to try the freeware from AVG and Zone Alarm, simply because more of you have given favourable reports about them.

Hopefully others will have benefitted from the advice also.

Cheers

Don

I've been using AVG for quite a while , trouble free. Now Thunderbird instead of Outlook, and Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, and all you feel is safe.

I've used AVG for several years at work and home. Last year we bought a new Dell for the study which came with Norton pre installed, but we had nothing with problems with it. When it found a problem, it invariably required us to remove it manually and sometimes it would take up to half an hour to sort out the problem. Finally we decided to swap over to AVG, so we downloaded the AVG free edition, whilst still under Nortons protection, then ran a full Norton check, before installing the AVG and uninstalling Norton. We then ran a scan with AVG and it picked up 3 virus's which Norton had missed!

Never had a problem since. AVG for us every time.

Gary

Rico said earlier:

quote:

Malware: I've been using that free one... I forget the name of it, it's by some guy in germany who dedicates it to the most beautiful girl in the world. very effective, and clearly memorable. Can anyone help out here?

it was Spybot Search & Destroy.