Virus/ Firewall Protection Free or Fee??

No! On the contrary they are very good. It is offered as advertisement and enticement to get you to buy their full product which gives more features and for which you get full support.

In a business, you should be using purchased packages to get full support and you can work out arrangements for corporate licenses.

 

From our experience Norton is not the best. Not even close to the best. It is just a big company and a big name. They are quite bad at removing many different problems that they can even (sometimes) find. And they consume a tremendous amount of system resources. If you read thru the threads you will see thousands of people using Norton and having all kinds of infections on their systems. Many of the infections Norton does not even detect. And as already mention, ones they did detect, they often fail to fix. And in some cases they even released a special tool to fix the problem and they tools did not help and often fail to find the malware that was easily seen with many every day tools.

No one is saying you have to switch. That is your decision. Also no one says you have to use the free versions, if you buy your software now, you can always buy the pro versions of software like AVG and ZoneAlarm.

Note AVG even offers a version with a firewall - AVG Plus Firewall
Also ZoneLabs offers a firewall and and antivirus - ZoneAlarm with Antivirus
Zonelabs also offers a full secuirty suite - ZoneAlarm Security Suite

Which is the best is sometimes a matter of personal choice, personal needs, and sometimes skill level.

Using trial versions first can give you an idea of whether you like something and it suits your needs before buying.

 

I have bounced around and found AVG to be the best free alternative overall. Firewall I use Windows, but I am using a router, so I have hardware protection. Firewall before was Zone Alarm. I also installed SpywareBlaster and use Microsoft Anti-Spyware as my primary spyware tool with Ad-Aware for regular scans as well.

 

Antivirus: AVG or Avast both work fine for me!
Antispyware: Spy Sweeper + Spyware Blaster + Spybot's Immunize & SDhelper
Firewall: ZoneAlarm Pro