McAfee or Norton?

John_Gray

I'm fairly happy with ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite, software firewall, antivirus, email scanner, and so on. £25 from Amazon. This is behind a hardware firewall.

But, as always, Your Mileage May Vary...

John

Rex_Mundi

I use Norton, Nod32, Avast, and AVG on different home computers. The latest versions of Norton do not have the same resource hogging problems as they used to. It is a very good antivirus suffering from a bad rep because of previous versions years ago. People have seen the problems in the past, and think this still applies (even though they haven't tried this software recently).

Someone said to avoid Zonealarm. This is a cracking firewall, and has been for years. What 'stuff' does it cause it problems for? All the reviews of the latest Zonealarm security suite have been excellent that I've seen. This is a good product. I've also used this for years, and not found any problems yet.

Out of the two free antiviruses (Avast, and AVG), my only problems have come from AVG. In my experience, this is not the best antivirus I've come accross. I was most disappointed this week to run it on a friends computer, and find that it couldn't remove a virus even though it had found it. It wouldn't even let me quarantine the file. Avast sorted this problem out after one scan.

Zahc

I've found that the 'stuff' people go on about with ZA is the initial 'learning' period of the program. They get exasperated when the program asks for permissions and the like, but don't realise that once set up it's a great program. Excellent tutorial comes with it as well.......

humfer

Zahc wrote:

I've found that the 'stuff' people go on about with ZA is the initial 'learning' period of the program. They get exasperated when the program asks for permissions and the like, but don't realise that once set up it's a great program. Excellent tutorial comes with it as well.......

Very true - it used to annoy me slightly when it kept asking for my permission to open realplayer, etc but once yourve used it for a while and have worked out the rather simple solution is to give permissions permanently it all works great

Rex_Mundi

Zahc wrote:

I've found that the 'stuff' people go on about with ZA is the initial 'learning' period of the program. They get exasperated when the program asks for permissions and the like, but don't realise that once set up it's a great program. Excellent tutorial comes with it as well.......

Any decent firewall once installed should be asking these type of questions. If a firewall gave access to everything without asking, then it would be pointless having it.

I was really looking at................

steer clear of zonealarm can cause all sorts of probs with stuff,

Which was posted on this thread, and (I feel) needs a bit of backing up with a bit more information. As it stands, there is no proof/evidence/background to back this statement up.

Fraserca

Buy a router and mostly your risk from malicious intrusions will disappear - silently.

Do remember that most people are not tech savvy and Zone alarm just asks for too much user intervention.

I have been called out on more than one occasion to a ' can't get on the internet ' problem to find that the option " disable all internet traffic " has been selected.

Its far too powerful an option to be on the menu bar for the unwary to select in error thinking it is another safety feature.