i hate norton! lol i wanna dump it and get a new antivirus, any suggestion onto which is the best, most reliable antivirus software?

norton=


also i need to get a good firewall too... currently i got mcafee personal firewall plus, which was provided free from my isp. (no zonealarm or such -_- too complicated that is...

Hi Pritesh, welcome to SAF

Norton is a good program, but, unfortunately, it is heavy and tricky to set... there are some for free on the net. Personally, I use AVG free, http://www.grisoft.com/doc/40/lng/us/tpl/tpl01 but someone here prefers other AV... I also use ZoneAlarm free as firewall, http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/comp...reeDownload.jsp

They are working fine for me.

Hope this will help,

Chris

Have to disagree here.

AVG is not good. Stay away from it. Those who use AVG and say it is good are lucky and/or practice safe surfing. It consistantly rates poorly in independent testing.

If you want a free one, stick with AntiVir or Avast (see links below in my signature). Both are good. The required avast registration is annoying however.

If you want a paid antivirus, the best are Kaspersky or PcCillin

AVG is fine, IF you practice safe surfing habits and know what you're doing. I like it because its very light on the system, uses very little resources.

QUOTE (xpgeek @ Jul 8 2005, 08:18 PM)

IF you practice safe surfing habits and know what you're doing.

Those can be two very big IF's.

I know that a lot of AVG users are die-hard fans, but that does not change what I said about it not testing well. In a test by wildersecurity, it only caught 72% of viruses. It did not do well in Interceptors testing, Pinned in this forum.

AntiVir and Avast also are light on resources but have much better scanning engines. They are also free for personal use.

How is Avast really.

I've been wanting to try Avast, I know and have known how poorly AVG tests but I haven't had a virus in about 4 years because I do know what I am doing, but have heard people tell me Avast is not light on resources at all.

I actually dumped it for AntiVir. Avast tests pretty good, but now requires registration to update. It is very cumbersome. A few months ago, I tried to update on a laptop from a hotel dsl line and it completely messed up the program. Not sure it was Avasts fault, but I did not want to go through the hassle again. I uninstalled it and went with AntiVir.

The said laptop is an old clunker celeron 450, with 128mb ram. It (edit ran fine with Avast and runs fine with AntiVir (end of edit) I doubt the laptop would even start with Norton installed!.

I have intentionally gone to a few questionable hacker sites that I know try to upload viruses and AntiVIr stopped them all. Panda online and Housecall showed it clean when I was done playing around. Not very scientific, but it made me feel more secure (that plus it did well on the same tests I mentioned above).

Thanks for the reply.

I gonna give AntiVir a try.

No problem. I did an edit above to make it clearer. Cant type as fast as I think and then I get ahead of myself (or is it behind myself, as the case may be?).

I had not intended to knock Avast (I did like the program). Read the below post about their good support. I took the easy fix on the road and tried another product I had read about. I had been curious about AntiVir. I like that one now as well. I have links to both in my signature because I believe they are BOTH good products.

http://www.suggestafix.com/index.php?act=S...ST&f=16&t=16876

I uninstalled AVG, made sure its program directorys were actually deleted, did a registry scan, and tried AntiVir for a while. Then just for the heck of it after a couple hours uninstalled that and tried Avast to see what it was like.

I am veryyy impressed with Avast. It is a bit large, as it installs instant messenger scanner, P2P scanner, email client and web-mail scanner, web and network traffic scanner, but that is some incredible level of protection and seems almost impossible to get a virus with it all running.

Was 5 times the protection I actually need, so I custom installed it and toned it down to system active scanner only, and it is very light on resources and runs great.

Not knocking AntiVir, as you said they are both great, but Avast is just wow impressive. All the people I know running AVG I getting them to make the switch to Avast today. For the novice pc user that level of protection, the full install all protections running, is amazing.

Yes!

Glad to see more people going to better protection.

Hey Pritesh

In our time, surfing the net is one big gamble, and you sure need a good AntiVirus porgram
like a good hand in poker I can recommand NOD32 AntiVirus porgram.
It's lite, simple and defenitly do the work.
I have it for a year now, and havn't had any virus or spyware with it.

Good Luck

John

As far as I'm concern my favorite antivirus is Nod32.It is very low on system resources and fast,and besides it's doing its job well.Other good choices are:PC-cillin 2005,BitDefender 8,and Kaspersky 5.
As for the firewall there are 3 favorites:Sygate Personal Firewall Pro 5.5 ,ZoneAlarm Pro 6,Agnitum Outpost 2.7 Pro.

Now I have installed :Nod32 2.5+Sygate Personal Firewall Pro 5.5 a very good security combination.Not known any problem since using them together.

Interceptor's reports on AV packages is always well worth the read ... yes, they're long articles, but they're very readable and give quite a good potted summary.

Also, AV packages do vary from year to year: sometimes one company seems to have the upper hand, then the following year they lose the plot somewhat and another one takes the upper hand.

Some time ago, it seemed that AVG was actually pretty good and was being recommended all over the place. More recently, this has not been the case and Avast! and Antivir have taken over. 72% of viruses being caught might not sound too bad, but when you think of the number of viruses out there it actually isn't that great ... actually, quite poor.

I was using Norton until recently, but the subscription had expired so instead of renewing it I decided to go for Avast!. Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-Norton, but it is a real resource hog. The Avast! registration process is somewhat cumbersome, but it wasn't too bad for me and it was all over in a matter of a couple of minutes.

One other thing - some people like to install 2 AV packages, thinking it will offer more protection. If you do this, make sure that only one of them is configured to be your active scanner: having them both set up as active may result in the two "interfering" with each other and thus offering less protetion, not more. Use the second one as a backup to do a full system scan on from time to time.

Tka e my word for it, GO with the PC-cillin AV.I tis not load on your systm and updating it is quite fast.if get your hands on ,MC-cafee then it will be easy to secure.

I agree. I use Avast on all the folks that I build for and can't afford a good AV. But - if you regularly scan Newegg.com, you will pick up PC CILLIN Internet Security for $25. It gives you the best AV engine around, an excellent Firewall, a so-so AntiSpyware scanner, and wireless internet security scanner. In John's AV tests it always comes in at the top.