antiq

Some of your recommendations are very good and in my opinion the very best security software out there is available for free.

http://how-to-solutions.com/essential-free-windows-admin-security-software.html

That page lists all kinds of free software that will help boost security on Windows.

I now realise I am a complete novice about antivirus/firewalls. Having used Norton for years is it right that I can get better protection both virus and firewall for free or cheaper and more efficient?

Is there a problem with installing new antivirus software while Norton is still on my computer?

Read my blog:

http://symantec-sucks.blogspot.com/

I had to create this blog because I needed a place where I could show the world what I see on my screen: the idiotic errors and blatant flaws in Symantec's Norton-branded products.

Have a look and see what I see. The screen captures are pretty self-explanatory.


I personally use Avast at home and I have to say, the best av program out there. I've used this for 3 years already and it has saved my lots of times. Even if you go to a webpage with a virus on it, it will warn you then allow you to abort connection to that webpage. Register once a year for free, no biggy. Highly recommend.

The author is right on that one..

Norton 2004 with the latest definitions from 07 will not be able to catch viruses that norton 2007 can with the same definitions... that is because the actual scanning engine has improved since...

Personally I will recommend you just pay for NOD32... one of the best things I can say about it... there is NO working crack for it (there is a regfix that works for a day and then stops as it autoupdates). And I just can't trust an antivirus like norton or trendmicro that you can have cracked and patching itself without distrupting the crack (the same method crackers used to bypass the DRM can be used by viruses to take over the antivirus... which I often see happening with norton in my line of work as an at home/office computer repairman)

To begin, I’m agreeing 100% with Dex’s commment,
especially the last paragraph.

One thing inq forgot to mention re ‘Free av's’ is an email Pop scanner.
I can only compare Avira and AVG as I use them both a lot.
Free AVG has an email scanner, it scans your pop{Outlook/OutlookExpress/Thumderbird etc} emails before you download them.

Free Avira does not have an email scanner,
however imo, avira is better, and I prefer it.
Lower ram/CPU usage, less intrusive for installing on home users PC's,
lack of an email scanner really sucks though, u really have to ask users are they “using Outlook/exp/thunder”, if yes then= AVG

On the other side of the argument...
I'm using a prog called spamihalator(white list based spam filter-must set to agressive/-=everything is spam/,/ add CSV friends=great), and it negates 99% of email virus'i'ss'es
However...
€Avira does remove spyware(paid for €avira also has email scanner~€20per year)

I(my small company) repair approx 20PC's a week, & I (ie. v small workforce) live with this sh1te day in, day out

The Brand leaders suck, as Dex pointed out, they have their own unique vulnerabilities, too many to mention
€avira hits spyware as well, so does Zone Alarm Pro btw

/
btw, wtf with the lack of firefox support? no Verification code presented?
had to copypasta into IE
pain in the ass

Try out AntiVir. It's got an excellent detection rate... the best of any free scanner (besides BitDefender, I think...). Check out virus.gr for real scanning tests. What good is an AV that stinks at finding viruses? Also check out http://www.av-comparatives.org/. You'll be surprised.

ClamAV has a realtime scanner.
Check this one !
http://www.moonsecure.com
Look at the "Info About Moon Secure" section

Regards

Obi

I thought that was a good article you wrote on the free AV programs. A few points deserve to be expanded upon. Antivirus programs detect *hardly any* spyware, and Trojans have proliferated as a result. 

Even in their specialty area - there's no single AV program that will protect you against every virus. Personally, I run two free AV programs - Avast & Bitdefender. The important thing when running two, is to only allow one of them to use active scanning / resident protection. Otherwise they start fighting over your files. I use the other one for a weekly check against the other.

Lastly, well-known standard AV solutions often have a nasty drawback - and that is that specialised trojans have been developed to compromise them. By far the worst offender/victim is Norton Antivirus, which aside from being of dubious quality, is frequently hijacked in my experience.

I'd like the Author to provide a source upon which he claims Avast to be the best choice (I mean some sort of independent protection efficacy comparison). I myself use the free Avira AV because I found somewhere on the net such a comparison in which both Avast and AVG turned out to be way less effective than Avira's. Regards PS. Thanks for very good series of guide-articles.

I've been using AVG for about 8 years now and it has never let me down. I upgraded from the free version to professional after a few years because I considered it an excellent product - worth paying for, even if I didn't have to. I have since upgraded to the Anti-Malware suite which includes spyware scanning.

I havent used any antivirus software on my home (windows) pc's for years. They slow your computer down, hog all your memory and are generally very annoying.
I think any reasonably sensible person who follows basic rules (like not running exe's that you don't know), has a decent firewall and a secure browser doesn't need one. 

Everyone once in a while I run use an online one but that's about it.

Obviously if other people are using your computer then you have don't have much choice.

You might be referring to http://winnow.oitc.com/malewarestats.php - which indeed (at least the last time I checked) places AntiVir at the top of the free options (and IIRC at least often at the top, period) in terms of virus detection rates (it detects a large percentage of scumware as well; the free version doesn't have an email scanner, but the real-time watchdog will still catch email nasties if you actually try to access them). AVG is however a good choice for Win98 users, since AntiVir doesn't provide real-time scanning on that platform (unfortunately, neither does AVG's free anti-spyware product, and while SpyTerminator does its real-time protection doesn't). Both use relatively small amounts of system resources (really: since we're not gamers we have no need for performance beyond that which 1 - 2 GHz Athlons can provide with 256 - 512 MB of RAM, and still don't notice any degradation while running these programs).

Comodo is indeed a good firewall choice for Win2K and later; we use Zone Alarm v5.5 for Win98 (their recent versions don't support it): since we sit behind a hardware firewall/router, nothing much makes it to the PC firewalls anyway. Jetico reportedly produces a better firewall for Win98, but our systems had serious problems with it.

While this series of articles is a good start, there's a great deal more relevant information available at www.techsupportalert.com (especially their list of over 100 useful freeware utilities for Windows).

Trendmicro.com's 'housecall' on-line scanner is another good choice as confirmation that your base product has done its job - and it's more than happy to work in Firefox as well as IE.

That's the reason why it wasn't included

The author writes "The snag is that an out-of-date anti-virus program, even with the latest definitions, can't catch the new viruses that later versions have been rewritten to spot and remove."

That doesn't ring true to me, I was under the impression that the updates you download daily/weekly are the library of AV signatures that your files are checked against. I didn't think that any definitions are stored in the AV program exe itself. 

I'd be interested in reading the links you have from your research

I read in a popular pc mag out of the free programs Avira was the best & detected the most viruses in their tests.I originally used grisofts but it was awful & failed to detect a no of viruses,i switched to Avast but had this feeling it wasn't detecting all the viruses due to the behaviour of my computer.When the license ran out i switched to Avira & straight away it detected viruses that Avast had missed.I haven't had any virus related problems & I dont think their license license expires,i've been using it for over a yr now & have been impressed by it

Nod 32 is the best virus protection program hands down. I'm very surprised this was not in the article.