Which security?

[tinpants]

Our Norton Internet Security is about to expire and rather than just pay out another £50 or so for somethinbg that may not be the best can anyone tell me which is the best security system for a home PC?

We were thinking of McAfee. Is it any good?




Ta muchly. :D

[diamond]

Yes its good, it's what fizz and i use on our laptops.

[kwak zzr]

i use AVG free edition, never had any problems.

[Jabba]

i use AVG free edition, never had any problems.

Likewise, but I use it with ZoneAlarm firewall, too.

[creamerybutter]

I recommend Nod32 (http://www.eset.com/), doesn't miss much and doesn't eat all you system resources like Norton does.

[MavUK]

If you do anything 'interesting' with your PC don't use McAffee. I used it for 12 months and had nothing but agro trying to get it to work. When speaking to the tech help I was simply told that it wasn't compatable with all the two most usefull apps on my PC (1: IIS, 2: Philips wireless music player).

Mind you at the same time I have also had nothing but agro with Norton 2007 (2005 on the other hand seems OK most of the time).

When my current norton subscription runs out I'll switch to Avira AntiVir (free for home use) and the Windows Firewall - seeing as I am behind a router my PC's fairly safe from the internet anyway. If you're also behind a router then I'd reccomend this. I've been using AntiVir for about 12 months now on my old machine with no issues...

Stu

[husky03]

found mcafee to be crap and messed about with my emails too much-if you've got norton just re-new your subscription to it online-you'll save about £20 doing this-if you've been happy with it for a year why change and have the hassle of removing/reinstalling.

husky

[Stig]

Zone Alarm Pro

[Spiderman]

AntiVir is free http://www.free-av.com/ and for me a little more user friendly than AVG.

There is some controversy about Zone Alarms being owned by an israeli military firm and dailing home to send encrypted data from your machine.

http://news.hping.org/comp.security.firewalls.archive/0289.html

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=90968

worrying stuff eh?

[New Leaf]

stick with Norton, but don't review your subscription on line - it'll cost ya a fortune. Buy it here instead:

Clicky (http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NORTON-INTERNET-SECURITY-2007-BEST-DEAL-NO-VAT_W0QQitemZ280078429868QQihZ018QQcategoryZ3805QQ ssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem)

I've bought 2 from him now and they are real Norton discs with activation codes etc.

[El Saxo]

+1 for AVG here & ad-aware for getting rid of spyware

[fizzwheel]

I dont get this, I've never ever had a problem with McAffee. I use it as Liz said so does she. So do the near on 1500 desktops and servers at the company where I work. We had one or two niggles with a couple of citrix servers but never ever a problem...

However personally I wouldnt touch Norton with a barge pole. Slow, interferes to much and wont let me have enough control to do what I want on Liz's mums laptop. Whereas Mcaffee just sits in the corner and deals with everything that is chucked at it...

Werid isnt it. TBH any off the shelf package will do what you want some of the freeware stuff is good to. ANYTHING is better than nothing. Dont forget to keep your operating systed patched with the latest security updates from Microsoft though...

[timwilky]

Another McAfee user here. Our 25,000 pcs worldwide all run it. My only niggle was as standard the virus scan access protection blocked port 25 (SMTP). The line in console tools says "Prevent mass mailing worms from sending mail", forgets to say prevent the user from running a mail client.

Doesn't bother the corporate types who use notes, but buggered up my personal mail until I sussed it was my laptop and not mail server that was acting up.

I run avast home edition on the daughters and brothers pc's.


Now folks one word of warning. A couple of years ago I had a distraught daughter, all her uni work had disappeared from her laptop. Sure enough when I checked she was virus ridden. I could not understand it as I had installed avg. Turns out the updates was scheduled for 3am. She always turned it off a night. So the damm thing was never updated. Make sure your antivirus updates whenever the thing is turned on. Even if it slows you down getting started.


I also use antivir on my linux boxes. I do the occassional scan with it. However I tend to use it within my email system. All mail that comes in/out of my personal email server is at least virus scanned

[Marshall]

+1 for NOD32

[Baph]

Just to be awkward :)

My company policy is to use ZoneAlarm Pro for virus use (we have a hardware firewall, so it's not deemed as needed for firewall usage). Why? Because they were running Norton (I think - it was before I started here), and it missed a virus that brought the entire network to it's knees, and stopped everyone doing any productive work for a few days. So ZA Pro it is :?

What do I run on my work machine? Comodo Firewall Pro & ClamWin Anti-Virus :) Why? Because ZoneAlarm Pro is pathetic, and hogs too many resources. Comodo is run because I have things on this machine that conceivably, other people might want to look at, and I like to choose who can see what. ClamWin because I've used it for years, it doesn't hog resources, and I've not known it miss a virus yet.

And yes, I could be sacked for not following the company policy & being more productive for my disregard of the policy (in theory ;) )

[Filipe M.]

+1 for Nod32, just because it's not a resource hogger like Norton, and I've seen it catch infections McAfee didn't even want to know about. :? YMMV, though. Running some Ad-Aware scans now and then won't hurt too, IMHO.

[northwind]

McAfee was very poor for me- quite system intensive, and it constantly blocked emails with the reason "The originator of this message is a Friend"- in other words, it was blocking addresses that were on my whitelist. Happened over and over, and each time I contacted McAfee they said "Just reinstall it"- well, on the occasions they bothered to respond. Also, it insisted on saving copies of every email received to my hard drive in a hidden folder, even with that function switched off, which caused the virus scan to gridn to a halt up every time it reached that folder (which naturally, was full of viruses as every email got saved there, and had tends of thousands of files in it to check)

I could manually fix both of those just by deleting the copies (which was time consuming) and by combing the blocked emails, but you shouldn't have to when you're paying money for a service. To be fair, both of these faults were with Spamkiller not the antivirus elements, but the customer service was rotten too.

Then, when I decided to ditch it and installed AVG, it found a worm that McAfee had missed. Last nail in the coffin...

[wyrdness]

OS X or Ubuntu :D

[gettin2dizzy]

there was a recent test
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6331959.stm
its good to see windows vista is even more vulnerable than xp ever was. good work microsoft :thumbsup:

[Heed]

NOD32 and Kaspersky are both very good and use up very few system resources. Kaspersky is free if you are doing an OU course too.

Personally I use Kaspersky and I've never had any problems with it.