I've been around a long time. I started with norton AVB and liked it, until it got to be such a resource hog. Then I switched to McAffee and ran into the same problem. Then I got Panda. It might not cathc quite as many as the best, but by the same token, it didn't slow my system down to a crawl. I'm now shopping for another suite. I am still happy with the Panda product, but I do really hate it when a company decides to automatically renew.
Thank you very much but I want to decide when you get money out of my bank account. And don't even try to get it straightened out with their "customer service"!!
If you do decide to go with Panda, make sure that they have autorenewal turned off, and that it stays off.
With that said the best AV is intelligent computing. Don't download and install anything that you don't understand fully and also make sure that you trust the source. I also run Firefox for my browser. It is not quite the target that IE is.
Unfortunately, a manufacturer's own site tends to be very biased. After all, they are trying to sell their own product.
Please ignore, sorry, missread "suite" as "site".
My 2 cents . I've pretty much tried all of them over the years, between my own pc's (main pc, and a "media center" hooked to the living room tv), doing some IT work at my job, and helping out friends.
First, you get what you pay for. Rarely will a free version protect you as much as a paid for one. Though I have found Avast to be my favorite in that area. Paid for, thats like asking some to choose between a Ford or a Chevy.
I'm not going to go name by name. Some are better at virus, and some stronger at catching malware, though I'll skip to my personal favorite at the moment. Norton 2009. I know the OP says he doesnt like Norton, and neither did I (the older version are resource heavy, updater sucked, etc.), but if you try 2009 I promise you will be suprised. It has a high protection rate of catching virus, a little on the low end for malware though. Very low on resources, and they seemed to of fixed the updating issues. Plus, a lot more control over it than previous versions. I'd say if you already have Norton, go ahead and upgrade to 2009, it would be cheaper than buying a new suite anyway. Plus, since you already have an account, you could even just try it out before buying it.
Just make sure you fully uninstall the old version before the upgrade.
My opinon, and it will propably change by next year, lol, but for now it is what it is.
Actually he didn't say that. He just said "from what I hear norton sucks"... There's no reason to change a suite if you're happy with it, as long as you are sure it does its job. Read unbiased info on how efficient the suite is at keeping your system clean, if you think it's good enough, keep it. "What you hear" is good for pointing out possible problems with your setup, it's NOT a reliable source for facts. When it comes to managing your computer, blindly acting on everything someone tell you WILL cause problems.
Always make sure you know what you're doing, and make sure facts you get are accurate and applies to the current version of whatever you intend to get by checking it with several sources.
Never trust a plain statement that "it sucks". If you can't find any REAL fact (real life tests, statistical comparisons and such) backing the statement, there's no reason to trust it. - You should ofcourse make sure you have REAL fact on the performance of your security suite before you buy it...
Comments like "I wouldn't use that ****" is very common, but they are entirely USELESS without information on why, when and how. So just ignore those remarks.
It's really a perfect example of why I have "don't believe everything that's true" as my all time favorite quote. Just because it WAS true, 99% of people out there still quote that as a still valid fact. So my suggestion is to only trust sources that actually present RECENT facts, along with references to sources. Also make sure you read reviews on the version you have/intend to get!
I have used just about every antivirus suit you could possibly imagine over the years. My very first antivirus suit was norton and yes I switched many years ago to other alternatives. My latest antivirus was nod32 and it did great but I recently switched back to norton after all the great reviews and they have really made a 360 turn altogether.
To be honest I'm pleased to say it's currently the quickest, safest and best antivirus software I have used to date and i never thought i would be the one to say this in regards to norton but facts don't lie. They even went so much out of there way to implement cpu usage statistics and some other usefull stuff into the antivirus itself so you can see for yourself it uses nearly 0% cpu usage/resources. It's great!
Edit: I forgot to mention they even have a Gamers Edition available which is really great aswell!
Whether these things interfere with your computing... thats my benchmark. Also, how thoroughly the thing embeds itself into your OS... somewhat like a malicious virus or trojan (!)... thats another.
if ur willing to get a paid full version i have been using zonealarm suite comes with most everything u need all in one and i also use threatfire and spyblaster with it. i have had no troubles at all for yrs. Norton still is way off my list i have used it and hate it
Every time I've tested zonealarm, it has caused application conflicts. I have no clue how you've gotten away with using it for YEARS without issues... I'm not ruling it out permanently though as you seem to have done with norton, I don't do that with software.
oh, and WarlokLord. I don't care if my security suite becomes one with my OS as long as I can remove it properly, be it with third party software or whatelse...
I had to get rid of it because it kept on crashing fullscreen applications (namely GC2, but others as well) because the VSmon service kept crashing, restarting, and stealing focus, without even actually showing anything.
So every 5 minutes I'd be alt-tabbed to the desktop, and when I'd try to go back into my game, it would crash.
So then I tried Outpost.
Funny story, that.
Turns out Outpost is incompatible with AVG.
I learn this after installing Outpost alongside an already present AVG installation (no incompatibility warning), rebooting as it asks, and receiving a BSOD on bootup.
So I try safe mode.
And I get a BSOD booting into safe mode.
So now, I'm using Comodo, and although it's quirkier than I'd like, it does the job.
Well, not everything is compatible with everything else. The deeper the anti-virus embeds itself, the less options you have to temporarily suspend its operations when you encounter a software conflict. There is a parallel here with DRM schemes.
Actually the parallell would be with the malware. It's kind of obvious that anti-malware need to run on the same level of the OS that the malware itself does.
I don't see how it's similar to DRM at all... DRM is not harmful, there's NO evidence that any of the commonly used DRM apps do any kind of damage, just a bunch of loose accusations and people nodding without having a clue...
I think Avast is the best. And I have used the free and the pro versions. Not much difference in my eyes.
I have been a paid AVG user for quite a while, did a little research, and Norton Internet Security has done a re-write of the program and its performance, i had my doubts, with Norton and all, well i'll tell you i installed it a week ago and this thing isjust great, very low resources, the scans are really fast, i never realized how big of a resource hog AVG was, just my two cents
I am now wondering if Trend Micro and Symantec have been working on solutions to the problem that resulted in my "throughing the Trend AV suite back in their face", although I suspect I wasn't the only one complaining.
My son also had the Trend Micro suite on his computer and his subscription just ran out. I told him about the problems I had and why I had switched back to Norton, and we were going to go through the complete removal process for the TM suite. But the first step (the desktop "uninstall program" function) completely removed TM, including all of TMs folders and programs, making the second step undoable. We had earlier noticed in the online description of the Norton suite that it checks for and removes conflicting hooks into the OS, so we went ahead and bought, downloaded, and installed NIS2009. So far it seems to be working fine; no obvious performance degredation, no glitches, etc. (But it has only been a few days.)
It has been 5 months since I had my todo with TM, and my son has been getting the TM upgrades automatically. I suspect that may be where he got the code upgrade for the uninstall of TM's suite.
AVG Free, it's designed for corporate customers, then given away free to private users, this makes it the best anti-virus you can get because it's designed by a developer team with a actual budget, and giving it away for free means more users, the more users it has, the more viruses they can catch early on. I've been using AVG for four years and never had a virus, for about three of those I spent 90% of my time online downloading torrent files, I've had AVG flag a dozen of so files for me as I was opening them, stopping me from ruining my system. My dad uses, against my reccomendation, McAffee, the only reason he'll get a new computer is because he's too lazy to fix his when it dies, he just bought his fourth laptop in three years.
You can find it at free.grisoft.com I would also suggest pairing it with SpyBot and running the TeaTimer, it will notify you of any attempts to access you registry and prompt you to allow or deny it.
LOL. Just tried to install/run it (it does require a download) and the installer immediately crashed IE7.
Not true. StarForce in various forms has slain a number of CD drives, or more commonly degraded the performance of them. DRM that is that perilous *is* malware... the intent is moot versus such effects.
And microwave ovens heat things from the inside out, and cows fly...
Show me a single, documented case where StarForce has been proven to cause hardware failure... You won't find it, because there is none. Hardware break down for a huge lot of reasons, StarForce is not one of them.
Not failure...but slowdowns and a very real reluctance to return function of the drive to the OS...or to external button-press.
Who rates as 'documented'?
Shall I do?
Good old GTR from Simbin.....
Just a quick notion - After AVG failed utterly to protect my sisters computer fom this latest worm, I went ahead and checked out the free versions (via http://www.av-test.org/ studies) of AVG, avast, and antivir, both of the latter are reviewing better than AVG for malware and a number of other issues than free avg -avast was actually the strongest of the three, but antivir did only slightly worse and with about a third the process footprint (700 Mhz PC = important);
Just a thought - Jonnan
Wait, are you talking about the one that MS patched out back in October?
Well, my company uses NAV Corp 10...
What works for you, what you like.
I use AVG Free myself. A few false positives, all cleared up in a day or two. No other problems.
Supposedly yeah. I know for a fact (having built the PC in question, albeit ages ago.) that XP was updating automatically. It got in anyway - {grrr}. Also past several other defensive items (inc AVG).
Which is why the main OS is Ubuntu now, the XP is simply a backup for those few programs that she needs for that.
Jonnan
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