I figure now is as good of a time as any time to spread some information on antivirus programs. It’s the end of the year, so may be you have some personal time to devote to your PC and it’s maintenance, or perhaps your current antivirus subscription is coming up for renewal, so it might be time for a change. Or may be not.
For a few years (1999-2004), I used Norton Antivirus (By Symantec) antivirus products exclusively. For it’s time, it was good, though as the years went on I began to grow tired of Norton products, and large resources they required. I then switched to Trend Micro PC-Cillin, which has been a great product for me that I continue to support.
Recently, I tried a program I had heard about for a while, NOD32 by Eset. I happen to be a big fan of not fixing something that isn’t broken, but Trend has recently provided me with an error (update: to which I found the cause of, and the cause was human error-mine) that I didn’t happen to like.
NOD32 allegedly uses less resources then even Trend Micro, and Trend Micro was very lean. With NOD32, you’ll lose spyware scanning, firewall, and WLAN detection, but with other [free] spyware programs, at least the Windows firewall, and a properly secured WLAN, there is no harm in losing those features.
I don’t happen to be a big fan of Windows Firewall, so I checked out Kerio Personal Firewall. Nice looking firewall that I’m trying out now.
This all being said, there are antivirus programs out there that are very good, and very cheap. Free in fact. AVG and Avast are two antivirus programs that get excellent ratings and have free versions available, in addition to the subscription services.
A lot of people will ask, OK, OK…but all I get offered with my new PC purchase from [insert major PC manufacturer here] is Norton Internet Security 200x or McAfee…what about those? Well, my answer is “If you like something and it’s worked well for you, stick with it.” For me, I don’t happen to like McAfee products, though I used one of their DOS-based antiviruses in the mid 1990s. Norton products have left a bad taste in my mouth because of some policies they have, and also the “bloated” nature of their products. (I had a really bad experience – twice actually – with their “System Utilities” packages from 2000 and 2004.
Whatever you do, use *something*. Unless of course you use an OS-X or Linux based machine, where level of virus infection is next to none, compared to that of a Windows based computer.
So, let me guess, you want all the links to some recommended antivirus applications? No problem…
Microsoft Trusted Antivirus Partners
Avast
AVG
KAV/Kapersky
McAfee
Eset’s NOD32
Norton/Symantec
Panda
Kerio (Firewall)