Computers & Home Networking

[Agent9216]

I believe that Kaspersky is one of the best AVs out there. Runs fairly quietly in the background and gets a ton of definitions.

One thing to note is that no AV will serve as a "catch-all."

As the user, you are ultimately in control and what you choose to authorize/click could very easily negate your AV.

I like to compare AVs to home security systems. You can have the best system in the world, but they don't help much if you forget to enable them when you leave the house or if you (even unintentionally) open the door and let a criminal in.

[Ach3r0n]

NOD32.  Kaspersky would be 2nd choice though it is a bit overly aggressive.  McAfee and Norton are a waste of your time and even a script kiddie could disable them and hack your system within minutes.

[mrmazo]

You opened up a can of worms with this question, Mikaela, lol. I have tried both Norton and Crapafee, err...sorry, McAfee. Norton was totally ineffective and McAfee crippled my system during scans. Both were slow with updates to current threats. Finally a friend who is an IT specialist recommended I try AVG since it had a free trial. I liked it so much because of the user interface and that it didn't bring my system to it's knees when it was running scans. I have run the full version for two years and found that it is very good at catching things "on the fly" , it is quite thorough and updates on a regular basis, sometimes several times a week. From what I understand, Kapersky is also very thorough as well and certainly worth looking into. However, no AV program is foolproof as I have been called a fool before to the point of not even AVG or Kapersky would have helped! Suffice to say, there are some really nasty bugs out there, so, be careful, and stop going to those porn sites!! LOL, j/k!!

[cmnetworx]

Every virus scan will miss something.. 

Kapersky is pretty good, I guess panda has some kind of cloud based scanner now.. Not sure how good that one is though..

For a good perspective, I always check out av-comparatives.org

http://av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/main-tests

These guys do identical tests with quite a few virus scans and give you the results..

I personally have had the best results with Avira, sometimes running threatfire as a 0 day scanner.

but I have also seen avira run like crap on some people's computers (maybe 4 ppl out of 100)

[bajaatvfan]

Mikaela26,

Go usually with the free options, or the ones you can just run online. I like to use http://housecall.trendmicro.com/. There are two things about anti-virus software...one that it's only as good as how up to date it is so sometimes the online ones work best since their virus defintions are updated on their server. The other thing is that virus software are good for different issues. Different software are better at different issues. Some are best for firewalls and others can be used to address specific problems.

[EatThatApple]

I would recommend symantec (norton internet security), this is a good a-v so it has it's requirements, buying it you should have at least 2GB (and a quite good CPU) of memory or using your PC will not be a delight. Everything has it's price

[Neihn Valued Contributor]

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EatThatApple wrote:

I would recommend symantec (norton internet security), this is a good a-v so it has it's requirements, buying it you should have at least 2GB (and a quite good CPU) of memory or using your PC will not be a delight. Everything has it's price

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That is exactly why you should avoid Norton. There are far better complete solutions out there including ESET Smart Security 4 or Kapersky Internet Security 2010. Both of those on any machines i have had them installed had very minimal memory and CPU usage even when doing a complete system scan. McAfee and Norton are the 2 big name companies i would avoid.

[Entropy]

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SlimJim77 wrote:

Have to agree with Nokia as well. There is no defense against stupidity. At one time I was using Kaspersky antivirus. I consider it to be very good, but I got it for free. It has since expired.

I currently run NO anti virus at all. The BEST antivirus protection is a mindset. There's nothing in this world that is free. Live by this mantra online, and you'll be safe.

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Same here.  I periodically run a ClamAV scan against my Windows from either a LiveCD or one of my Linux partitions, plus a periodic Malwarebytes and Ad-Aware scan, and that's it.

I think I've had 2-3 infections in the past decade, and in both cases I was able to remove the infection without reinstalling, but 99% of people out there can't do that.  (It cannot be done without "offline" access to the infected drive, such as a Linux LiveCD or a Linux partition on the same machine, and even with that prerequisite, you need to know what you're doing.)

[slamuel]

I'm also one that runs without an AV app but for my parents and friends that insist on making me their tech support I have been going with Microsoft Security Essentials lately.  I'm also a fan of AVG, Avast, and Nod32.

[Entropy]

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slamuel wrote:

I'm also one that runs without an AV app but for my parents and friends that insist on making me their tech support I have been going with Microsoft Security Essentials lately.  I'm also a fan of AVG, Avast, and Nod32.

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I have heard quite a few good things about Microsoft Security Essentials.