Anti Virus Software

cazarol

Just wondering what anti virus software everyone uses, free or otherwise and what is recomended. We renewed Norton on 1 December 2005 and paid over £50 only to find it was for just 160days, shortly after this it was half price in all the major retailers. I am not convinced that Norton is the best anway, I thought I had seen a thread on here but now cant find it again for the life of me. Any info or even a kick in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

EasilyAggravated

IMO norton is the worst antivirus available. it clogs your system with too much junk that you cant get rid of if you decide to change.
personally i use mcafee security centre because its not just anti virus, its also got a firewall, anti- spam, privacy centre and adaware remover. would only recommend it if you use more than 512mb ram but i rate it as one of the best. however if you cant get hold of a copy of it then theres a few good ones. avg personal and antivir are a couple of decent ones

Quincy_3

Norton is brilliant deffo worth the money IMHO.

phill79

EasilyAggravated wrote:

IMO norton is the worst antivirus available. it clogs your system with too much junk that you cant get rid of if you decide to change.
personally i use mcafee security centre because its not just anti virus, its also got a firewall, anti- spam, privacy centre and adaware remover.

Noooo, Mcafee is the first thing to be uninstalled when I am setting up new Dell PC's on a network. Horrible piece of software. Norton is just as bad with their security centre.
The best I've found is Symantec (Norton's parent) Antivirus Corporate ed.

I know you might not be able to get this, but you did ask what other people use.

PierceUK

i find norton slows my system too much so i use avast antivirus (rated as best in a PCFormat ag a few months back but that wasnt compared to norton)

if you did want norton its always on a half price special at all retail outlets. at staples(my work i know shameless plug) there is norton internet security with ghost for £29.99 for a full years license so its not a bad price but if you want perfromance then it might be worth looking else where

wonderfullife_2

Hi
Never paid for an anvi-virus product yet, or firewall for that matter, I've found the free AVG, does a great job, updates daily and I've never had any problems with it.

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/2/lng/us/tpl/v5

Browntoa

another vote for AVG

xycom1

I have always used Norton Antivirus on all our machines. Now some of them have McAfee antivirus supplied free from university, but now looking to change as some more of my Norton update subscriptions are expiring soon.

Would go for Microsoft OneCare but only available in the USA.

PierceUK

I had AVG ( two years ago i admit) and i found that when i did a panda activescan it found two viruss that AVG missed on its full scan :-(

which is why i unistalled and went for http://www.free-av.com/ for a little while before going to avast on PCFormats review

shopbot

Another vote for AVG! Use it in conjunction with a good anti-malware scanner such as Ewido and periodically scan with an online scanner. There are links on the sticky thread at the top of the Techie board.

danmanchester

I vote for Avast free too or if you want to pay Nod32:consistently voted the best paid for antivirus around being the only one not to have missed a new virus in the wild in VB tests in the last 7 years.

From the Eset/Nod32 website:
Fast Performance
Great detection doesn't have to slow down your computer. Written largely in assembly language, NOD32 continually wins awards for the fastest performance of any antivirus application, on average 2 to 5 times faster than the competition (source: Virus Bulletin). Switch to NOD32 and upgrade your computer's performance.

Smallest Footprint
NOD32 conserves resources on disk and in memory, leaving more for your critical applications. The installer is just 8.6 MB and the application takes up less than 20 MB in memory (this fluctuates with changes to the detection technology). ThreatSense updates, which includes heuristics logic and signatures, are usually between 20 kB and 50 kB. Switch to NOD32 and reclaim precious resources."
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