What's best out there for protecting my computer?

Question

i.e., viruses, etc.

Answer 1

norton, webroot spysweeper

Answer 2

Whatever you do, do NOT get a massive "Swiss Army Knife" product.

McAffee and Norton both have these massive, bloated "suites" of products that claim to do everything. What they do is to grind your computer to a halt!!!!

My customer run a good AV, such as McAffee Corporate Ed, or AVG, or maybe TrendMicro (basic install only).

They then run Spybot and AdAware.

They use the XPsp2 firewall, which is good enough for 99.9% of the users out there when combined w/ a good AV.

If you want spam filtering, get email from an ISP that does spam filtering -- ie, Hotmail. If you've got your own domain, you have a choice of spam appliance (Barracuda, Netcleanse, SpamAssassin) or use a service (spamcop, etc).

Answer 3

"The best" is subjective and preferences on protection level, versus cost, versus ease of use varies.

Panda antivirus is ofthen in the top 3 antivirus programs. It is however expensive. Very professional and powerful.

Norton antivirus is very popular, but is very ressource hungry and is subscription based. (You pay a yearly fee for updates). Easy to use ans almost idiot proof.

McAfee for a long time was practically the authority on Antivirus. Easy to use, also very power hungry. Don't know about their update model.

AVG: Free antivirus, pretty easy to use and free updates. My personal favorite.

Then there is trend micro antivirus. According to a lot of propellerheads out there, it may be one of the best when you compare efficiency, versus price, versus ease of use and is not to power hungry. As far as paid antiviruses go, this would be my favorite.

For spyware:

Again, there are several solutions, personally I like Spybot Search and destroy, coupled with the "hijack-this" tool.

However I have to give Kudos to MIcrosoft's anti spyware program. It works like an antivirus (automatic regular interval scans and real-time protection).

I usually judge these programs based of the frequency of their updates.

And finally, firewalls.

I am partial to using hardware firewalls (routers). But if you are only conserned about incoming traffic, the firewall built in to windows XP (Sp2) is quite sufficient.

If you are a bit more paranoid, you can use a more controlling (in and out traffic) like Zone-Alarm. (which has a free version).

Take the time to read the documentation with this software or you may find some of your programs not working properly with your internet connection.

And for the propellerheads, Black Ice Defender was often a favorite. Having a quick visual logging of the blocked connections and popular plugins to help manage that data.

HTH

Answer 4

You insatll a standard antivirus soft ware such as Norton, AVG , Avast ( free antivirus software and Ad-aware, Ewido ( free spyware removers). You can download free softwares at
http://fixit.in/antivirus.html and http://fixit.in/spywareremover.html

Answer 5

Norton Security Suite is pretty good for your overall protection.

Answer 6

It depends on the kind of protection you desire to have! There are some good anti-virus software available in the market.

Answer 7

AVG antivirus and spware doctor

Answer 8

http://yanswers.blogspot.com/2006/10/essential-free-internet-security.html

Answer 9

Check out my utilities page for some good freeware I use myself.

http://zippydog02.googlepages.com/utilities