"Anti-virus" packages
Posted by: notnaim man on 20 November 2018
My Norton package expires soon, my provider is John Lewis, who offer the complete Bullguard package free of charge.
Does anyone have experience, I found a couple of online reviews that rate it at 3 out of 5 stars, but then seem to say it does everything right.
After reading the security software review in the Jan 2019 issue of PC Pro I decided to bin Windows Defender and install Plusnet's, my internet provider, McAfee package. Free for 3 months then £2.00/mth. McAfee didn't have the highest rating, 4/5 overall, but it was considered to be a lot better than Windows Defender (1/5 !?!).
BT Virus Protect is developed in conjunction with McAfee and is probably the same as used by Plusnet.
Dave
O my fleet of Macs I use the Sophos Anti Virus Home Edition. So far so good - I have been using it for several years.
Many years ago after some trying of different things I settled on Norton, which was great - easy to use, seemed effective, and provided some additional tools that were useful. However over the years it not only got more expensive, but it also got less friendly/flexible, and more and more wanting to control what I did and how I did it (rather reminiscent of Windows). I switched to Kaspersky, which I have found better than Norton had become, though it also is annoying at times.
Using these I’ve never knowingly had a virus or other malware: but of course that doesn’t prove effectiveness as on the one hand I might not necessarily be aware, and on te other I may just have been lucky - I’ve known some people with no AV software who have said the same.
dave4jazz posted:McAfee didn't have the highest rating, 4/5 overall, ...
BT Virus Protect is developed in conjunction with McAfee and is probably the same as used by Plusnet.
Dave
That was pretty much my finding too dave4jazz but it's not bottom of the pack by any means. As they say though, "other offerings are available." Yep, unsurprisingly the McAfee branding is right on the BT offerings, good that you mention though it in case some may not be aware.
It's interesting to see the wide variety of products being used by forum members. There doesn't seem to me to be one clear market winner in this space but I personally like the simplicity of plug 'n play with the BT offerings and no incremental cost is a bonus.
I help a number of people maintain their computers (6 + my 2); in each case when they've been lax in their AV protection their computers have rapidly become infected with spyware and trojans.
I did have an instance of a virus infecting a Linux partition in a VM on my machine, but it couldn't survive me rebasing the VM (which is why I was using a VM for that particular project).