deciding on an anti-virus

[wellmonster]

hey all ... i'm getting a new pc in a week or 2 and i'm just wondering wat anti-virus program i should get. pc wil have vista, so.. i'm thinking norton 360 ???? maby. the pc will be used for online gameing mostly so ... yea i guess an anti virus which wont slow my pc down much or take up much room (=

[andsome]

If you look through comments on this site you won't let anything from Norton anywhere near the machine. If you want a decent one at a very fair price you can get the full security suite Nod 32 from Eset, complete with firewall. There are plenty of free ones, but in my opinion Nod 32 is worth EVERY SINGLE penny. What is more, you can get telephone help from here in the UK. :D

HERE

[Belatucadrus]

Andsome mentioned the free AV products, at the moment there are quite a few to choose from and most of them are excellent.

Best of the bunch IMHO avast! & a nice PCMag review just to show how good.

Other possibles are :- AVG, Rising, Antivir & Comodo and PCTools.

You only really need to buy if you're a commercial operation and have a legal requirement for a business license.

[wellmonster]

If you look through comments on this site you won't let anything from Norton anywhere near the machine. If you want a decent one at a very fair price you can get the full security suite Nod 32 from Eset, complete with firewall. There are plenty of free ones, but in my opinion Nod 32 is worth EVERY SINGLE penny. What is more, you can get telephone help from here in the UK. :D

HERE

thx man i'll look into nod32 .... just a question wat so bad about norton???

[Belatucadrus]

wat so bad about norton

Three things mainly:-

1) For years they had a reputation as a system hog tying up the resources of all but cutting edge PCs, though to be fair the latest products have been much improved.

2) They have a habit of continuing to sell signature updates to old unsupported versions, leaving people thinking they're protected, but when some new nasty crops up that the program can't handle, their response is invariably, "tough luck mate, should have bought the new program". I don't know of anybody else that'll take your money knowing full well that the product you have is obsolete and incapable of doing the job. Nod and all the freebies are more honest and give better support to the product.

3) Invasive bit of software can be ridiculously difficult to remove sometimes.

[andsome]

When I had a problem, the damned program would not uninstall. After a long search on their site I eventually found out how to contact them A reply took a couple of days, and it consisted of a link to a removal tool which did not work. Several removal tools later they put me in e mail touch with a technician who linked me to more removal tools, and he gave me instructions as to how to edit the registry. NEVER EVER AGAIN THANKS, I don't let anything remotely smelling of Symantec anywhere near to my computer. Even after all that lot, I was never completely happy until I formatted and reinstalled Windows.

The ball is well and truly in your court, make your choice. :D :D

[theguy]

the best antiviruses by paying: kaspersky, NOD32

the best antiviruses which are free: AVG (sometimes doesn't work cos it finds huge numbers of unknown malware which arent actually malware), Avira AntiVir (very fast and good scanner, but can be annoying because it asks u to buy the pay version every time it updates), Avast (one im using now, no problems, but IMO its scanner is not as good as the other two)

[Scarecrow Man]

ClamAV (a Unix Antivirus) has a Windows port called ClamWin. Being a freeware junkie (and even more of an open source junkie) I use it almost exclusively on my Windows systems.

http://www.clamwin.com/

[EvoPro]

NOD32 is a very good program. I like Online Armor as a free and easy to use firewall. Winpatrol is good for controlling your startup programs properly.