anti virus

[Baz]

its that time of year again when my AV is due for renewal and just wondered what every one else uses,how you find it pros cons etc,how much do you pay for it or do you use a freebie


Im on NOD32 at the moment

[Glenn]

Microsoft Security Essentials http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/mse.aspx

[tehidyman]

Microsoft Security Essentials http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/mse.aspx

Seems to work OK for me as well. Free and does not appear to slow operations down as much as AVG.  Always seems to be up to date.

[.Griff.]

Another vote for MSE.

[Technical Ben]

Not had any troubles with MSE so far. Especially as it's MS, I could argue it's got no slow down due to windows integration. As it is part of windows.

[Rik]

NOD, but I'm a dinosaur.

[BrianM]

AVG paid for version includes firewall etc for years, happy with it, i'm also a T.Rex, stick in the mud. Now £38.99 per year,  the free version was ok but maybe i like to waste money.     

[pctech]

Prevx 3.0 from me (the paid version)

Updates constantly from remote servers so can set it and forget it.

[zappaDPJ]

I'm another MSE evangelist. It's free, unobtrusive and in my case it's done the job so far as well as any paid for solution I've used.

[Lance]

I'm using Avast free at the moment but might have to switch to MSE going by this thread!

[Baz]

I'm using Avast free at the moment but might have to switch to MSE going by this thread!

yeah i was a bit surprised by the number of MSE uses.


might take a look at it

[Inkblot]

Used AVG (Paid version) for a long time - probably 5 years or so but after a problem between it and Win7 64bit a while back I switched to MSE and have never looked back since. Only thing I fin odd about MSE is sometimes the updates appear in the 'recommended' section but that might be where it has already updated in the past hour or so, not sure as it doesn't happen often enough for me to worry about it

[Den]

Norton 360 for me, it seems to do so much more than just antivirus and it was half price at PC World so was cheeper than renewing my Norton 2010.

[Niall]

Oddly enough I was talking to someone about NOD32 the other day, and mentioned the major problems it had with Vista 64bit and Windows7. They were saying that it's now working correctly on Windows 7, with no slowdown/false positives, etc.

Can anyone confirm this? I liked that program, and if it works again I might have a nose at the suite they do/did.

[RA-1972]

MSE for me to its free and works well with windows 7 .

[armadillo]

IMO, reports by individual users of the efficacy of MSE, NOD (which I use), Avast etc are anecdotal and useless. Individual users experience a small sample of threats and cannot make any statistically significant conclusion. You can draw no reliable conclusion from whether or not your particular AV product has or has not stopped a particular infection nor whether an infection missed by one product was caught by another.

Have a look at the reports of
http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Note the On-demand tests, which use up-to-date AV definitions; and the Retrospective tests, which apply threats to AVs with out-of-date definitions, to simulate how products respond to new threats which have not yet been defined in AV definitions. And they report the incidence of false positives too on the grounds that any product which reports everything as a threat would have a 100% detection rate but be useless.

They test the AVs using a test pack of around 400,000 pieces of malware.

You can also access older reports to see if products achieve consistent ratings.

There is not a great deal of difference between the top few products. I suggest you draw your own conclusions.

A good strategy is to pick one of the top six or seven products as your installed AV and also scan from time to time with a non-installed product from another software developer. Also bear in mind that switching from one installed AV to another is not without its hazards. They are notoriously difficult to uninstall successfully.

[Niall]

For some strange reason, I currently have some form of problem opening pdf files within firefox at the moment. It seems to start loading, then do bugger all. Bah, bumhugs.

[D-Dan]

Linux Mint, Debian Edition (LMDE) works very well for me

[zappaDPJ]

For some strange reason, I currently have some form of problem opening pdf files within firefox at the moment. It seems to start loading, then do bugger all. Bah, bumhugs.

I get the same issue in FF but only with pdf files from some sources.

[pctech]

Reader seems to have a problem streaming some files on anything slower than 50 Meg

If this happens best advice is to right-click on the link to the PDF and use Save Link As...

Tried to get to the bottom of this as some of the sites I support at work have lots of PDFs and it works fine when on the same LAN as the server but if I test the same file on a BT ADSL connection we have in the office for testing external access I encounter the problem.

Also sometimes see it on my Zen connection here at home.

[JB]

Linux Mint, Debian Edition (LMDE) works very well for me

And me.

[JB]

I'm using Avast free at the moment but might have to switch to MSE going by this thread!

On my only remaining Windoze machine I use Avast free also. I have always been happy with it's action and low payload. I did try MSE once and it seemed OK.

[Rik]

Oddly enough I was talking to someone about NOD32 the other day, and mentioned the major problems it had with Vista 64bit and Windows7. They were saying that it's now working correctly on Windows 7, with no slowdown/false positives, etc.

Can anyone confirm this? I liked that program, and if it works again I might have a nose at the suite they do/did.

I can.

[Gary]

Its a shame Esets CS is so unhelpful as can be seen over at wilders, I used to use it on the laptop but now use MSE and Prevx, Eset has had issues, its detections were awful for a while (not looked recently) and i got fed up of the bugs.  Go back 4 years or so and it was top of the tree really. I just refuse to pay for something with bad customer service and ludicrous hoops to jump though to get problems recognised, the Mac version I think may still block iPods syncing...handy that, you can add an exclusion but that's not really the point, and you have to drill down though the interface, not something my mother could do, or some of my friends.

[Simon]

F-Secure Internet Security for me, and have been using it for the last six years.