I seem to remember some time ago that Norton was not liked by the STW IT experts. Is this still the case?

Any others worth checking out? Am happy to pay for my PC to be safe and secure.

Thank you so much. 🙂

Avast. Free, quick and easy. Just the way we like it.

never had any issues with AVG free

AVG has gone horrifically bulky and slow in the last 18 months.

NOD32 is pretty good. Paid for, unless you keep altering your username/password to free trial ones. I've heard that lists of these are freely available on the net.

Microsoft MSE seems pretty good, use it at home on Vista and XP.

avast

Microsoft Security Essentials. Free, works as well as anything else, and less likely than most to mess up your PC.

On the recommendation of some people in the IT security business, I've switched all my computers from AVG to Microsoft's Security Essentials which seems to work perfectly and unobtrusively and is free.

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials

Norton seemed to really slow my computer down a couple of years ago, but I've got the latest version at the moment and it seems less bloated than it did.

It's also pretty customisable so you can get it to a point where it doesn't start downloading or instally updates while you're in the middle of something.
I'm using it on an old PC (6 yrs or so) so should be better on newer kit.

Microsoft Security Essentials. Ignore anyone who disagrees, for they are wrong. (-:

I'm quite liking the idea of Threatfire at the moment too. Works well with MSE.

Whatever you do, uninstall your previous AV before installing a new one; they fight, and it's not pretty.

A lot of home versions of AV default to overly aggressive settings, the idea being that %age detection rate is more important than anything else (as this is what gets printed in magazines doing comparison articles). The fact that your PC will be on its knees by this point is of no concern to them.

Norton is historically very very guilty of this, hence its reputation. They're actually very good products on the whole (with a couple of exceptions), they just need a bit of effort to switch two thirds of it off after you've installed it.

(I've installed a lot of Norton products over the years, in the realm of thousands of clients rather than dozens, across multiple sites for different customers and also internally, so I've got a reasonable amount of experience here).

AVG Free gets a load of positive views on here but I think, somewhere in the small print it says that if you agree to use the free version, Grisoft will sell your email address details to companies selling viagra, imitation watches etc etc. Plus like someone else has said, it does seem to really slow things down when running a scan.

Decided that with all my photos etc, it was better to pay a bit and get something decent. Norton 360 user now and it seems excellent.

AVAST…..i'd personally avoid Norton like the plauge.

Avast

MSE here.

+1 for MSE. Works very well and no nag screens. eSet if you want to buy something

I've used AVG Free for years and have never been spammed for Viagra.

AVG used to be the best free solution, but it's got progressively worse with recent versions. I used to be a strong advocate of it, but I jumped ship a couple of years ago now and haven't looked back.

Avast is pretty decent still. But MSE is better.

Harry, chuck me your email address and I'll fix that for you. (-:

As an aside re: scans,

You (should) have an on-demand scanner running all the time. Assuming you start from a clean slate, what is the point in running a scheduled full system scan every day? If you've picked up an infection then the on-demand scanner will catch it, if it doesn't then neither will a sweep of the system.

The only advantage to running a full scan is to pick up infections that got onto your system before you downloaded the virus definitions that can recognise it. Assuming you update regularly, that's basically zero-day infections, of which the chances of affecting you as a home user behind a hardware firewall are slim to none.

Install your AV, set it to update regularly, do a full system scan and then switch off the scheduled scans. If you're feeling particularly paranoid, you can run manual scans periodically when you've nothing better to do. Far better than having the PC thrash its brains out every time you power it on, analysing tens of thousands of files that haven't changed since the last time you booted up.

Arguably, you can dial down the on-demand scanner too. If you've scanned a file and it's not changed, why scan it again every time you read it? You can usually set up on-demand scanners to scan on write but not read. There are implications to this (in particular, you need to be careful when you introduce removable media, and it's not as belt-and-braces as scanning on read), but depending on what AV you're using it can give a massive performance boost.

But now, we're back to risk assessment again.

Thanks so much for all the replies. 🙂

What is interesting, if my memory is working, is that I seem to remember that not one person liked Norton.

Shall study the replies a bit later.

Just to add to this, spent last night switching from MCafee (subscription had expired) to MSE and Threatfire. Also ran both ccleaner and one of the other similar applications recommended on this and other threads.

MSE found 2 worms.

have also cleaned off a load of stuff and tidied 175 issues in the registry.

STW is great. Thank you to everyone!

There is no true one app that fixes/protects against everything. IME Kaspersky Internet Security (KIS suite) is highly effective and customisable, especially when couple with Malwarebytes Malware and Spyware Terminator.

Do a Google and you might find KIS 2010 still available for the £20 or so download offer that I snapped up a while back.

Only a fool who likes parting from their money pays for AV. They're all fallible, it's snake oil. Kaspersky has a reputation as the best, I think I last used it in 2008, so it shall have evolved, but it was definitely more resource intensive than the current Microsoft Security Essentials.

MSE here with Windows, Clamav with linux because I'm protecting Windows users backs.

I would have said Avast, but recently had problems. Something had got onto my hard drive and was trying to connect with a website. To Avasts credit, it was blocking the connection, but how did it get there in the first place? I hardly use my computer for anything: STW, UKClimbing, Ebay, emailing, weather forecast, news and online purchases, paying bills. Did a hard drive scan with Avast and found nothing, downloaded Malwarebytes, did a scan with malwarebytes and found 2 trojans.

Some people like the feeling of security from paying for AV. If I were to buy one, it'd be Kaspersky. I'd just get the AV though, I have an inherent distrust of "total security" packages, they cause more headaches than they prevent (and most people just click 'allow' when it flags a warning anyway).

Kaspersky is available on the software4students offer, if you're elligible for such things. £15 iirc.

I did use AVG, but even without a scan running, the system was getting slower and slower.
I had a look HERE,for free antivirus and it all seems good so far, I also use the recommended firewall now, and the anti malware.
Hope that helps.

Avast Anti Virus is good. All our nerds (developers) at work swear by it!!

Kasperski! or Bullguard.

The AV recommendations on MSE there are pretty much in order, best to worst.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with a third-party personal firewall. Three reasons,

1) The one built into Windows is reasonable,

2) You're behind a router with a hardware firewall which, whilst usually not locked down very securely, gives you a layer of separation which is sufficient to stop most drive-by attacks.

3) They tend to be chatty, which I'm not unconvinced isn't intentional to go "look, I'm working, aren't I great!" – everyone immediately clicks 'yes' to any pop-up dialogues, rendering the entire thing useless.

If you're on a dial-up connection or USB ADSL then absolutely get a personal firewall; for the vast majority of users however, it's more trouble than it's worth.