Which Virus Protection should I use on my home PC?

Question

I currently have Norton installed, but it is due for renewal. Should I stick with them, or can I rely solely on the Windows free downloads? Some people recommend McAfee? What advice would you give me?

Answer 1

Hi there,

Instead of all these "Mine is better than yours" answers that go on around here, I'll instead answer with the facts.

Looking at current protection ratings, AVG scores a lowly 90% protection against all known viruses, whilst Avast comes in at 92%. This means they are letting through roughly one in every ten viruses - pretty shocking.

Norton and McAfee are slightly better by protecting against 98.3% and circa 97% respectfully of all known viruses. However, Norton and McAfee can be known for being very heavy programs which can tend to slow down certain machines. If you are thinking of installing either of these I would definitely recommend you download their free trial to check it does not affect your machine in this way prior to opening your wallet.

If you would be interested in other Security products that are better than all of these, you should try either Prevx1, Kaspersky or F-Secure who all score over a 99% protection rating.

Out of these three my recommendation would be Prevx1, as this is the quickest at protecting against new outbreaks of malware.

Answer 2

nod32 usually perform the best in tests however it gets slammed for its poor user interface. I run it and it isn't the most intuitive however I have no problem with viruses. It also uses very little memory compared to the symantec/nortons of this world.

A very good alternative which is more user friendly is karspersky which also does very well in viral tests.

For all those recommending avg then I am afraid the stats don't stack up. They do very poorly is any anti-virus comparisons I have seen however thats not to say that it isn't effective most of the time for most of the people its just that it could do much better. If you run any sort of p2p network such bittorrent, limewire, etc then you cannot rely on avg to protect your system adequately. If you are going to take risks like that then you need proper paid for anti-virus solutions as you really do get in this case what you pay for.

If you don't run such systems then you probably will get along very nicely with avg.

Answer 3

I think the major players are all pretty much the same, and the choice is more about what you are comfortable with. I just renewed with Norton and put it on my laptop as well just to make things simpler. I agree with the person above that it can hog some resources, but there are ways to compensate. I had Mcafee on the laptop, and then used AOL's free program, and I believe they're all about equal.

Answer 4

McAfee is a good virus detector, and so is Norton Antivirus as well. I'd say you should stick with Norton Antivirus and update it to 2006 like I have.

There's also NTL Netguard, which is very good at tracking viruses. It comes up with a box saying 'Virus Detected in site' whenever you enter the site. You should try this or keep your old one.

AOL has one too. I don't know much about this though.

Answer 5

Download AVG.
One of the main problems with Norton is that its virus defination database is not much up to date and many viruses are easily able to pass through. Secondly it consumes too much system resources.
AVG is a good AV, simple and dows not slow down your computer. You should give it a try and if you feel comfortable, then switch.
You can go here for AVG: http://www.grisoft.com/

Also for better protection here are some softwares you can use.
Other than viruses, computers also suffer from malwae and spyware so you should have protection from them.

http://www.safer-networking.org/
Uber powerful tool which can search and annhilate nasties that make it onto your system. Now with an Immunize section that will help prevent future infections.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Another very powerful tool which searches and kills nasties that infect your system. AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy compliment each other very well.

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html
Great prevention tool to keep nasties from installing on your system.

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareguard.html
Works as a Spyware "Shield" to protect your computer from getting malware in the first place.

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ehowes/www/resource.htm
puts over 5000 sites in your restricted zone so you'll be protected when you visit innocent-looking sites that aren't actually innocent at all.

http://cleanup.stevengould.org/
Cleans temporary files from IE and Windows, empties the recycle bin and more. Great tool to help speed up your computer and knock out those nasties that like to reside in the temp folders.

Windows Updates - It is very important to make sure that both Internet Explorer and Windows are kept current with the latest critical security patches from Microsoft. To do this just start Internet Explorer and select Tools > Windows Update, and follow the online instructions from there.

http://toolbar.google.com/
Free google toolbar that allows you to use the powerful Google search engine from the bar, but also blocks pop up windows.

http://www.trillian.cc/ or http://www.miranda-im.com/
These are Malware free Instant Messenger programs which allow you to connect to multiple IM services in one program! (AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, MSN)

Answer 6

"ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite" in addition to the famous ZONEALARM firewall it also includes Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Identity Theft protection, Spam filtering, Parental controls, a Cache cleaner for zapping junk files, and Spysite blocking. http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/catalog/products/sku_list.jsp?dc=12bms&ctry=GB&lang=en&lid=ho_zass
I use this myself, and never have a problem with it + it's far easier than having to run & keep up to date several products doing the same job this does in one (which I guess also saves on RAM memory, keeping it free to do other tasks)

Norton is good, but their products also have a reputation among some computer experts for slowing computers down + nearly always get mentioned whenever there's some sort of software conflict going on.

Answer 7

in no way use Avast or Avira reason it had screwed up my pc. what i did replaced into to place in avg loose and microsoft protection necessities. then i found out that protection necessities replaced into lots greater suitable than avg coz whilst a avirus enters my pc first necessities pop up with a scourge yet no longer avg.So i uninstalled avg loose.

Answer 8

Norton's very resource-heavy, expensive and not terribly efficient.
I'd recommend either AVG or Avast!, both free to download, frequently updated and effective. But ONLY run one anti-virus, otherwise they'll fight!

Answer 9

I like Norton. Had Mcafee did not like that!! And would never have anything from aol. They use too much of your hard drive with any of their programs.

Answer 10

If you want something for free try, AVG antivirus from grisoft, if you want something better i would use Norton antivirus 2007