I have been talking to friends a lot lately about anti virus programs and I was wondering what you all thought.

I use AVG on my own systems, both XP and Vista machines (not sure if it will work when I set up my Linux machine), but friends of mine actually subscribe to McAfee (but seem to have more virus problems than I do).

I would be interested to know your thoughts on McAfee, AVG, Nortons, PC Tools, and any other gems that you might know about.

I also use free firewalls (generally turn off my windows firewall), on my XP machines I use Zone Alarm and on my Vista machines I use PC Tools free firewall. Again not sure what will be compatible with Linux when I get around to setting that up.

Your views would be appreciated, thanks heaps

Kitty

Try Free Antivirus like Avast or Avira

The 3 you mentioned above I would not use. Too high on system resource
There's a good review page here I liked: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ but it comes down to personal choice in the end.
My personal recommendation is Avira free Antivirus

You're talking about McAfee and norton which are paid anti viruses

I recommend

Kaspersky: IF you have a very fast computer as it is resource hungry but has a great reputation
http://www.kaspersky.com/

And

ESET Nod32

Right now you can either have

http://www.eset.com/ V3 (need to purchase)

Or The beta of V4 ( smart security or antivirus)
Which is FREE until 3/2/2009

http://www.eset.com/beta

I keep hearing norton 2009 is good but i can't confirm, i just don't want to try it and even with 2.6 mil in their database. they didn't catch the virus i had and had to format

For McAfee, the only new thing is the Artemis thingy. causing MANY false positives but increases detection rate.

I think AVG is slow ( the program)

I use Avast Antivirus, does the job for me pretty well. Norton hasn't been good since 2000, don't waste your money.

I have not heard anything good about Nortons, and it seems with the quality of the free software, it surprises me that anyone with home PC's would run anything different, but I have heard a lot of people say that they dont trust it if they dont pay for it... strange, I know.

My experience with free software has been pretty good, although the pay software I've used is ALWAYS better and more feature oriented. Take AVG free for instance. It offers good basic protection, but if you spring for the pay version you get much better protection including a firewall, rootkit detection, and customer support.

NIS is known for it's problems in the past, like being a resource hog for one. I can vouch that NIS 2009 is a very good suite. It uses a system where it flags trusted system files so it doesn't have to scan those files every time you perform a system scan. This makes the whole scanning process much faster than in previous versions.

It also provides a graph showing you exactly how much it's using your CPU and system resources, which is never that much by the way. It only performs scans when your system is idle and it seems to be very good at preventing you from visiting known malicious sites.

The home network features are excellent and you can easily restrict computers on your network from being able to discover your computer. Overall it's a very good suite that I highly recommend.

I couldn't tell you which is best, but my favorite is PC Tools Spyware Doctor and Anti-Virus. Spyware Doctor works particularly well at detecting and removing rootkits, which get into the kernel.

A constantly recurring question. You can spend the rest of your life investigating and comparing and never get anywhere. The short answer is this.

1 All AV do a good job.
2 Among premium tools, Kaspersky has a good reputation.
3 Among free tools, AntiVir PE is probably the best.

But this is a constantly developing field and things can change.

I prefer bit defender over every other anti-virus

McaFee gets a bad 'rap' but I have had no problems.

Been using McaFee for years and never have been compromised.

McaFee is a great product!

I run with AVG8 and Malwarebytes seem to do the trick of cleaning almost anything nasty out...

pc cillin is OK.
But you will find the "restore" feature handy on Windows.

I used the re-store feature and it solved some problems that i had .

i use AVG free but have still had some slip through. i wouldn't recommend it for laptops, i know both of mine freaked when I had it on them. I've used Norton and had viruses get through as well. I just don't know what to trust anymore, I've lost with both freeware and purchased software.

I used AVG up unitl the point when it wouldn't do anything but tell me I had a virus. I don't remember how long ago that was, but it's been over at least two years.

I've been using Avast ever since then. Combined with Ad-Aware and Spybot, I've only been hit with something big once on this computer since I built it, and it was no effort to fix that. And I had Avast on the computers I had before this one.

Nothing is foolproof, paid or freeware. But I'm happy with what I've been using.

Many opinions on this topic. As for "paid" AV software I would recommend bitdefender. It is rated one of the best and is also one of the cheapest. I think like $20 a year or less if you shop around
Check this site http://anti-virus-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

Bitdefender sucked in the latest av-comparatives and i think virus bulletin too

In my opinion, Kaspersky, you could turn off internet scanning or hardware scanning to reduce the resource used.

Of course it's: Kaspersky Antivirus 2009

There's already a thread about this running in the security forum. You guys might want to post in that instead of making this thread as long as that one.

I have been using Avast for quite some time now and have not had an issue at all.