To Norton or not to Norton

davidsonsl

Can anyone help, I have read all other threads and don't see an answer to my question.

I currently run AVG free edition & Sunbelt Kerio personal firewall. My husband is obsessed that Norton is best and 'these freebies are not as good'. Any advice????

My system does seem slow, I have upped memory to 512mb and it seemed fine after increasing but it is still known to be quite slow at times, my husband says it is because of the free security we are running.

epninety

If you think it's slow now, wait 'til you've installed Norton! :rotfl:
I've not tried Kerio, but it has a decent rep AFAIK, and AVG is pretty good - I recommend it to anyone who asks, and run the paid for version myself.

judderman62

If you are a truly, truly extreme masochisty then yes get Norton and embrace it.

If on the other hand you prefer an AV product that doesn't slow your PC to a shadow of it's former speed, is all but impossible to remove should you want rid of it and oh by the way isn't seriously poor in detection rates then the words bargepole , touch and dont spring rather readily to mind.

AV Progs:

Steganos/Kaspersky - essentially the same thing - same look , same great level of protection.

or

NOD32 - also very good and little drain on system resources - I use this one

Firewall - Comodo seems to be flavour of the month and winning A LOT of plaudits

hth

Judderblokey

swvillafan

Hi there,

Get your husband to see if he can pick up a copy of last months PC Pro magazine. They had a review of antivirus packages in there with Norton scoring 68% and AVG scoring 82%. There was another free product called Avira which was reviewed and this scored 92%. I personally use AVG and would bother wasting my money on Norton!

As far as the firewall goes I've not used Kerio before. I tend to rely on the inbuilt Vista firewall and the one in my Xyzel router to keep my safe. Might get some moans about the Vista firewall but then if your careful what you're doing online then you shouldnt have any problems!

judderman62

Unless it has changed in Vista the windows firewall only protects agaisnt traffic in one direction - making it 100% useless (one could argue mathematically 50% useless - but realistically 100%).

In your case clearly your router is also protecting you.

DKLS

judderman62 wrote: »

If you are a truly, truly extreme masochisty then yes get Norton and embrace it.

Totally bang on, Install Norton at your peril and if you want some real entertainment try uninstalling the ruddy thing, when they first started they used to make great anti-virus programs, now its bloat ware at its very worst.

Katykat

Sorry to highjack this post. I have Norton on my PC, it was installed when I bought it, but I have never updated it ( get the reminder every time I switch on) I'm really not techie minded. Would I be better uninsstalling it and downloading a different virus protection. My PC is very slow sometimes. I have XP home and I dont visit any dubious websites, but I email quite a bit

superscaper

Katykat wrote: »

Sorry to highjack this post. I have Norton on my PC, it was installed when I bought it, but I have never updated it ( get the reminder every time I switch on) I'm really not techie minded. Would I be better uninsstalling it and downloading a different virus protection. My PC is very slow sometimes. I have XP home and I dont visit any dubious websites, but I email quite a bit

If you never update your antivirus, it's pretty much the same as not having one. I'd go through the malware removal guide sticky as your pc could well be infected.

swvillafan

judderman62 wrote: »

Unless it has changed in Vista the windows firewall only protects agaisnt traffic in one direction - making it 100% useless (one could argue mathematically 50% useless - but realistically 100%).

In your case clearly your router is also protecting you.

I had a feeling the Vista firewall wasnt awfully good! My Xyzel seems to be doing the trick so far though, did a shields up the other day and it said i was pretty much impregnable!

)

superscaper

judderman62 wrote: »

Unless it has changed in Vista the windows firewall only protects agaisnt traffic in one direction - making it 100% useless (one could argue mathematically 50% useless - but realistically 100%).

In your case clearly your router is also protecting you.

As far as I know this isn't true. The vista firewall also protects outbound transmission as well and seems to be sufficient when looking at what's required from a firewall.

theallpowerful

I have to agree with the previous posters - Norton is horrible, and should be avoided like the plague! Slow, bloated, and not actually particularly good!

I use NOD32 (http://www.eset.com/) which is, in my opinion, the best AV prog I have ever used. I barely notice it's there in terms of system performance, and it seems to be very very thorough in all its scanning and protection.

Only problem with it is it's not as newbie friendly as some of the others, and takes a day or two for you to get acquainted with.

A few people I know use AVG and are perfectly happy with it, so I suspect AVG is worth a look too. Free does not always mean rubbish, and many free programmes I've used kick the heck out of some of their bloated commercial counterparts!

Good luck persuading the hubby out of the horrors of Norton!