Anti Virus Software.

[Clyde]

Anti Virus Software.
For many a year I have been using Norton Antivirus. Alot of people say it's not worth installing as it's not that good; I don't know the specific reasons, but from my installation of using it day to day I dont have problems, other than when it's performing a weekly scan. It maybe down to me not having much memory on my system ( 512 Mb ).

The reason behind this topic, is that my subscription has come to an end. As the price for renewing the subscription for updates and new Virus definitions, is the same price for buying a new package. And I wanted to know your views on the Antivirus software that you dudes use / and also if you either use Norton AV, or have had problems in the past with it and have subsequently switched to something else?

Cheers and many thanks,
Clyde.

[Shockwave]

Norton / Mcaffee etc in my humble opinion are better than no anti virus protection.. However I don't think that they are anywhere near as good as some virus killers.

As far as I am concerned, >> KASPERSKY << is by far the best virus killer out there and you can also have a free trial.

The first time I performed a full system scan on this computer, which had an up to date macafee from dell, Kaspersky detected 15 trojans that Macafee failed to find.

combine that with a good spyware tool like Xsoft and your system will be secure.
Personally I wouldn't use Macafee or Norton any more.

[slinks]

Bullguard is a fairly decent package, not quite as good as norton, but a hell of a lot cheaper. So long as you don't spend your whole day browsing dubious porn sites, illegal rom downloads and other potential virus-hives, there shouldn't be too much of a problem.

[zawran]

If you are looking for something that doesn't cost you anything and provides decent protection, then AVG might be worth a look. Swing by grisoft.com and take a look in their product section for Free. Norton really doesn't score any points with me, its more like a virus itself, it takes way too much resources and you can't really get it uninstalled once you got it on. Its like having a piece of annoying spyware if you ask me.

[Yaloopy]

Norton = prue shite.

I use avg and/or nod32.

[Paul]

AVG here, it workes fine

for spyware i have no active scanners but i regularly scan the pc with Ad-Aware SE Personal, avg antispyware and spybot.
All of these find different things and that makes me wonder how much crap they don't find.

[rain_storm]

NOD32 is the one I find most effective it has a really small memory footprint and doesn't seem to miss anything either in fact just open a folder that contains a virus and up pops a big eye tellin ya its spotted a virus and its been deleted just like that

[Clyde]

Cheers for all your replies and feedback, I will investigate these.

I have heard of an all in one package by Microsoft called "One Care" if I remember correctly. Which deals with Spyware, Adware, and Viruses. But it's only available at present to US Citizens. I wondered if anybody knew what that was like?

Thanks friends,
Clyde.

[zawran]

package by Microsoft called "One Care"

Its something you have to pay for. Its more or less like most other packages. I haven't tried the anti-virus part of it, but I have tried out the Defender spyware part, and I can't say if its any better or worse than the other options.

I generally doesn't really want to pay for anti-virus and anti-spyware products because I feel that the companies that pushes these products have an interest in never seeing those pests gone, so they are more than likely responsible for some of it in some way. Call it paranoid, but they wouldn't be making any money if there wasn't so much of that crap going around.

[Jim]

Norton AV is evil.  I use AVG on all the computers I look after.

Jim

[Shockwave]

I'm suspicious of Onecare because it has the microsoft tag..

You should probably buy Kaspersky if you want the best virus killer and want to pay for it, or download AVG like Jim says if you want a good free one.

[Clyde]

Any idea why I can't run tons and tons of gfx demos due to reports of a trojan to exes? its not the same watching them on you tube.

I have AVG Anti Virus 8.5. same reports with both Power Achiver2010 and WinZip 12 pro.

[Jim]

Because it's wrongly identifying the packers like UPX, Crinkler, KKrunchy as virusses, using a 'heuristic' or guesswork approach based on the fact that lots of virusses pack themselves to obscure what they do.
Having said that, I use AVG8.5 and don't have this problem.  Are you updating it regularly?

Jim

[Clyde]

yep at least once a day.

[Clanky]

I use SpyBot and Malware Bytes.

Malware has IP Protection, as well as a Real-Time protection.. like one said - if you open an .exe, .rar, etc - you'll be notified and it will be put into quarinteen.

I have used OneCare.. and it is really really good. I got a virus on a machine I hardly use, and I tried the free AVG, Malware and numerous others - but the virus prevented any 'virus protection' from running.. and when I got them running through cmd they froze. The good thing about OneCare is that it says 'Hey look out, some program is trying to stop me from running.. mo-fo I'm still going to start' and it works and gets rid of the virus.
I like Malware Bytes better though. OneCare has too much going on.

[Clyde]

Well I made a post on the avg forums, but got a right ticking off by the admin as it was my first post and had put it in the wrong place. So it's not a very good forum and I was trolled which doesnt give there support much of anything. I guess im going to have to use you tube to watch them on.

[Jim]

It's not a very good forum because you posted in the wrong forum and got told off?  Sounds like something I would do here!

Jim

[Clyde]

I posted in the correct section they had available.
All im saying is that the level of help isnt what I suspected.

[Hotshot]

Norton? System Hog !!!

I used Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and Microsoft Security Essentials 

[relsoft]

ESET Nod32 here.