Which Antivirus?

Question

After the Mcafee free trial ran out on my new Dell (Dimension e510), I uninstalled it and bought Norton Antivirus.  The long and short of that was I ended up uninstalling it and eating the 20 bucks.   I downloaded a 30 day trail of the Mcafee security center, and I am considering buying the subsciption once the trial ends.   My question is, are there any better antivirus systems I should look at before buying Mcafee subscription?   One note:  I really like thwe fact that the Mcafee security center comes with e-mail scan, virus protection, a firewall, system guards, realtime protection, etc.  My hesitation with getting another virusscan is that I would not be getting the whole 'security center' package along with it.    Is this a big loss?  Should I not worry about the firewall/realtime protection/etc?   Thanks.

MaximusHQ · Answer

Mcafee, although it offers good protection, uses a lot of system resources in the process. There are alternatives that would offer equal protection and use less computer resources and some are even free. You can look into security suites which include the antivirus, firewall, and antispyware all in one or get individual apps that cover all these categories when combined. I would suggest as far as security suites go that you take a look at kaspersky Internet Security as it is very good. You could also look into an antivirus such as Antivir or Avast which are good and free and Comodo firewall is a very good firewall and is free. You can get many free antispyware apps such as ad-aware, spybot, and there are some others as well. As far as paid for antivirus there are many. I and many others have great success running nod32 antivirus which is light on resources and has top notch detection alongside Outpost Firewall Pro 4 which is probably the most advanced firewall you can get now. Outpost Firewall passes many of the tests the others can't. I use a combination of Nod32 AV and Outpost Firewall on many computers with very different configurations and it works great on all of them so it seems to be a solid combo.

There are many choices and the only thing I would stress is to stay away from the big bloated suites Such as Mcafee, Trend Micro, and Norton. They are masters at advertising and come pre-installed on many new computers which leads a lot of people to just use them as they are already there. With some research and trialing you can come up with something better than those pretty easily. Security suites may make it easier to control everything from one interface and have a shorter learning curve, but as of now I believe no suite offers the best AV, Firewall, and Spyware Protection all-in-one which is why I choose to build my own.

Keep in mind this is my opinion and you should research and trial until you find what works for you. I'm not trying to tick off people who use mcafee, norton, or trend, but in my experience they have proven to be less than stellar.

onipar · Answer

Thank you for the in depth reply.  I have been having trouble with the big suites (Mcafee and Norton) which is why I decided to see what else is out there.   Right now I have AVG antispyware running, which seems pretty good.  Would it be a mistake to just use the microsofty firewall that comes with XP?    So, I guess I just need to choose an antivirus (I still have Mcafee running right now) and another firewall if the microsoft one isn't good enough.  Also, I read in smoe threads about getting a seperate trojan scanner?   And do any of these programs come with the e-mail scanner?   Thanks again.

joe53 · Answer

AVG or avast is all you need as noted above for an antivirus program.   As for your question about email scanning- both have it, but I would recommend you not use it. Not only is email scanning redundant, it can damage your Outlook Express.   See: Why not to use email scanners.

zbestwun2001 · Answer

WinPatrol AVG7-AntiVirus-FREE Zone Alarm-FREE

dalem29 · Answer

The Windows firewall is no good because it works only in one direction...in bound.  Zone Alarm Free home editon works just fine for ordinary use, and after a brief period of training it ceases almost all asking for approval messages and works quietly and efficiently in the background. Use either AVG or Avast (both come in FREE versions) in combination with it and you should be well protected. I use Avast and updates are available just about every day.   Message Edited by dalem29 on 10-09-2006 12:35 PM

onipar · Answer

Thanks everybody.  I think I have a good handle on this now.

onipar · Answer

My current setup is:  AVG antivirus (free version), AVG spyware scanner (trial version), Spybot search and destroy (free version), and Zonealram free version.    Any suggestions?

MaximusHQ · Answer

I would suggest you do online virus scans on a regular basis just to reinforce that your computer is clean. You can do online scans at kaspersky.com, bitdefender.com, and there are many more if you do a search for online virus scan. Some of them will detect the virus, but not remove it, while others will remove it too if one is found. For instance I have Nod32 AV installed on my machines, but do an online scan at kaspersky.com once every week or two just to make sure everything is good which it always has been. Never hurts to have a second opinion I figure and Kaspersky is considered to be among the best AV's. For spyware I use spybot, ad-aware, spywareblaster, and the anti-spyware that comes with my Outpost firewall. You should be in pretty good shape with what you have there. You can use the free ad-aware if you want to and spywareblaster is good too. Just keep windows, as well as your AV definitions and spyware proggies up to date and you should be good to go. Do backups too so if something ever happens you won't lose everything. Good luck.

fogleg · Answer

Loads of options from this site, and they are all free - or have free versions: Freebyte

Virus & Spyware

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