What is the best Antivirus Program?

Right now I'm using Norton Antivirus 2004 but I have heard a lot of talk over other antivirus clients such as AVG. My question I guess is what is the best one out there for download and a reason why its better than norton antivirus 2004. I am just wonderin because I heard Norton is slow and until I upgrade processors and mobo I just want to have as fast a computer as possible. Thanx for the help.

 

McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 7.0.0 at work, love it.

AVG at home, love it because it is free and it works.

 

I heard McAfee was terrible. Is PC-Cillin any good?

 

Been using McAfee products company-wide, around 4000 machines, over the last 5 years with no complaints.

 

Yeah but like he just said, are you using the personal/home edition or the enterprise edition?

 

Currently Enterprise as I already wrote above. I've used all of their programs over time.

 

At this point, I would say ANYTHING besides Norton would be better. Norton makes the system so slow. I think Sopho's has an AV client out there too, they are good at finding and recognizing trojan's and stuff. I currently use Norton because I bought and paid for it, I tweaked it so it wouldn't be so slow, but I still recomend something else.

 

How the heck did you tweak not to make it slow? is there a tutorial you could show me?

 

If you do an "advanced search" and type in antivirus, search titles only, in "software" you'll get a lot of threads. One is this one:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=29263&highlight=antivirus

 

I think I'm going try panda internet secuirity. since its shareware, is it a trial? I hate trial software.

 

NOD32 is my favourite, really low memory usage, only one service is started, incredibly fast scans, updates every 24 hours, and is currently has the best detection rate their is.

In general Norton 2004 is about the worst AV you can get, bloated, uses about 10 times the meory of other AV's, has the slowest system scan, updates are not daily, and has one of the lowest detection rates of all AV's. NAV2001 was the last "ok" NAV.

In order of my opinion (Based on alargeish company network)

NOD32
AVG
AVAST
Mcafee Enterprise 7

The rest








Norton

 

I use Avast 4.1. In the 8 months I have been running it, I have never had any kind of nasty get by it. It picked up 2 trojans that I unintentionally installed with a couple of downloads and got rid of them before any thing happened. It is small, totally free, unobtrusive and updates constantly. Works for me and all the people who I have recommended it to are happy with it as well.

 

Some kind soul on these boards suggested to me once to try Kaspersky -it cost a few bucks but I've never had a virus problem since. -Just recently there was an upgrade that *really* cleaned up the interface and made it much more user friendly. -When my subscription expires I will have no second thoughts about renewing.
Just my thoughts.
Yours,
522.

 

I have used Norton, Avast, Panda and currently am using AVG.
I have been using it for good 6 months now and prefer it over
anything else.

 

Neo,,,AVG is great,,,

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http://majorgeeks.com/download886.html

 

I am using Norton, i used to have Zone Alarm 4.
Zone Alarm 4 - FREE, EASY TO USE, AND EFFECTIVE.

 

No single anti-virus program gets everything. I use AVG and do an additional scan online with Trend micro or Panda once a week or so.
If you are going to pay for an AV program, I have seen good results with Kaspersky.
I think very little of Mcafee.
I think even less of Norton . .

 

AntiVir does a pretty good job for free.

 

AntiVir does an exellent job and the price is right. Using good freeware should make the big for-profit companies more competitve. Also Wyvern works free firewall seems to be doing a better job than my Zone Alarm (fewer unaccounted for ports opened).

 

Started with McAfee......AARK

Went to Norton.....out of the frying pan into the fire!!

Went to AVG......worked great!! But had to manual download updates...so

went to Avast! and have been happy ever since.

Found McAfee and Norton to be invasive, hard to get ris of and resource hogs, particularly on my 9x system.

IMHO...Avast #1, followed very closely by AVG. Extremely efficient , user friendly, and light on resource usage. just my two pennies.

 

i tried panda titanium....... didnt like it, ditched it and got Avast

 

Are you kidding? Norton is now one of the worst AV's for detection according to many sources, including the official Anti-Virus Mag site/Magazine. And its the biggest system hog by far. The last few releases from Norton have had serious problems with detection rates, and 2004 doesnt remedy this.

NOD32 has the highest detection rate, followed by Mcafee and then Kapersky.

Ill get my source later, my Work PC is playing up.

 

Naw i have ahd personal experience with NAV. Inclusing my own companies corporate tests. To us it proved inadequate in its detection, and way too slow compared to every other competitor. I dont think my bossw ould like me to publish our internal reports, but NAV detected about 21% less virii than our top performing AV. NOD32 and Mcafee were top. NAV's heuristics is pretty poor too, it has always had problems with new virii, but then again most other AV's have the same troubles.

I still rank NAV amongst the worst AV out there. They seem to be just living of a brand name, bloating it out each release, whilst the competition is improving their engines much quicker

 

No antivirus that updates only a few times a week, ala Norton, can catch everything.




That is common sense.

Technically, NAV only updates once a week.

 

Norton Antivirus let backdoor.lala walk right onto my system undetected. I had the latest updates from their site. I had heuristics cranked.

Go ahead, tell me that I wasn't using NAV properly.

That was the last time I used it, and I never looked back.

I've been better for it.

 

Its only updated if you go to their website daily. That is true of any anitivirus.

That is retarded as hell.

A good one auto updates daily.

 

I'm seriously considering NOD32.

 

It did miss 21%, we tested with several thousand virii if i recall. The vast majority were the new Worms and Trojans that are now so abundant.


Lets face it, when i new Worm is released it can infect 10's of thousands of PCs in an hour. And when Norton only Auto Updates once a week..that aint good enough.

Going to a website is not satifactory, im in a corporate environment, you expect me to SMS website updates daily onto 3000 PC's? Thats 100% work that shouldnt be needed to be performed by myself or one of my system admins. Auto update is a must. In fact bar the detection rate the lack of daily autoupdates was the biggest red mark.

Norton is no longer King of the Hill, there are cheaper, faster, more effiicient, less resource hungry, more regulary updated AV's these days. Thats not mentioning my experience with their detection issues.

 

Exactly

Read this :- http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114461,00.asp

The Mydoom Virus, 1 day after launch, accounted for 1 in 12 emails sent.

Just think how many emails are sent around the world each day, and just 24 hours and a virus accounts for almost 10% of them. Its pretty stunning how good these new virii are.

Now tell me you dont need daily or even bi daily autodates

 

Hmmm, lets see what do the large, vast majority of users use and have access to?

Not the corporate versions.

Lets stick with whats widely available to everyone.

 

Well thats bullshit. Number 1 call to Microsoft is virus/spyware related, and most have Norton 2004 installed. When I check, they have the latest definitions, according to Live Update.

Go ahead, retort and make up some BS story about how they updated it after the fact, or installed it while already infected. I'm sure you will, even though you don't know.

Bottom line Mastertech is telling us is you have to pay extra money to Symantec (by going corporate) for their products before they work properly and compete with the rest.

Hmm, do I want to do that? Let me ponder it..........

No thanks!



The truth is, and probably always will be, people use what is familiar. People use what is easiest.


Norton used to be good (not talking corporate), and became very popular. People are still following the crowd like always even now that it is a piece of poo.

 

I do not have to be a computer technician or network administrator to know that Norton is no good.

1. hogs resources
2. it does not update daily unless you pay for the Corporate Edition
3. It does not catch some viruses
4. some viruses that it does find (norton cannot remove)
5. It costs too darn much

There are free one out there that are far better than Norton and did I mention they are free

Why would I pay for a program like norton,

I use Panda right now and I am also not to happy with them

Their customer sevice needs improvement

I will not be paying for an antivirus program once my subscription runs out

Why would I do that.

 

I dropped Panda after the problematic stop error (BSOD) on shutdown that Goldfish was also getting, and now my wife is getting.

 

Well I've been thinking and I tried almost all the antivirus programs and I decided that I would just stick with Norton since I got that and it was working fine before I decided to research other ones. you guys can continue to post and stuff if you want ^_^.

 

/yawn