Best virus protection? (If possible in comparison to Norton 360)

bod1467

In other words - defeating the whole purpose of the facility.

abibee

I feel compelled to chime in. Another option (other than Avast) is Bitdefender free, which is very minimal, no pop-ups. And Bitdefender is always top rated in tests, so you can't go far wrong.

paddyrg

No AV offers 100% protection. In fact, according to industry experts including Symantec, most AV products don't even hit 50% effectiveness.

In the olden days, viruses moved slowly and vulnerabilities had long exploit windows before patching. This meant AV products could look for patterns of bits in files, and an update every few weeks (as I used to with F-prot) was fine. Now, vulnerabilities are exploited the same day they're announced, the number of viruses has exploded, and reactive pattern matching just isn't good enough any more. When the best of consumer AV products catches 45%, you know that hygiene is going to be a better shield than relying on outclassed products.

Fightsback

The best thing you can do is run as a standard user, it mitigates 90% of vulnerabilities.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/admin-rights-key-to-mitigating-vulnerabilities-study-shows/

kwikbreaks

I was running MS Security Essentials on all my machines until very recently. I have an old netbook which used to run XP but which I was able to update to Win 7 Basic thanks to NiftyDigits. Much of the time it was at 100% cpu which I found was caused by the MSE antivirus. I installed Avast Free instead and the overhead was far less. I doubt that it's any less secure.

Hammer_Slammer

I dont use windows defender or even malwarebytes free anymore as neither of them found a adware which took over my browsers.

Installed Avira free and that found it, so was pretty disappointed that scanning with the above couldnt find it unlike Avira.

gazter

Malmo wrote: »

Windows Defender / Microsoft Security Essentials (assuming you're using a Windows machine), in combination with Malwarebytes are all you really need.

What he said.

InquisitiveMind

Common sense. Lots of common sense. Hover over links that are in emails. Never download unexpected attachments, beware of every unsolicited email you receive. If the email is from someone you know, still beware.

Stay away from scummy !!!!!! sites / torrent sites. If you don't have a genuine windows then you're already infected. If you use pirated software, you're infected.

Follow your common sense and you'll be golden.