What is better at stopping online nasties

Have to agree with you there Steve, on one of the Uni networks I logon to, they use Endpoint and its menus and features are good, quite impressed at the layout, but the enterprise versions of McAfee and Symantec have always been better than there retail counterparts IMHO, I used to have McAfee Enterprise from company I worked for and it was great.

The user! may sound like the smartass answer but in many cases its what the user does, be that not install a core set of security apps, update the OS and any applications that connect to the net, to where they surf and what they download, sadly and this reality, a large proportion of users on the net hot with malware want something for nothing and by this I mean p2p and music, films, games and apps.

Be it a free AV or a retail paid one nether are perfect but they do a good job, Sophos and Symantec are always like any retail corporation going to say FREE is not good, but I can only go on my own experiences with the time i have been on the internet, now approaching 20yrs and in that time I have not been infected with malware, the ones when I was unsafe surfing have been caught by whatever AV I have been using.

I tend to use Free AV and Avast is and has been good for me, but we all get different mileage out of our favourite apps, and the point I'm getting at is use whats best for you, if what you are using is keeping you malware free then great stick with it and no need to change.

Reading many of the last reports from AV Comparision sites, really has all the main well known free and paid apps pretty close, with some scoring better on some aspects on test and some scoring better on others.


I tend to run with
NAT SPI Router
Windows Firewall (Vista x64)
Windows Defender
Avast Free
Spywareblaster
and Malwarebytes as a backup scan.