protection

[Missy D]

Today my subscription for Norton has expired which I have found not billiant at all. What protection have you got on your pc. I have no idea which one to choose. Need to get something installed soon before I land up with lots of viruses.

[martingold]

Today my subscription for Norton has expired which I have found not billiant at all. What protection have you got on your pc. I have no idea which one to choose. Need to get something installed soon before I land up with lots of viruses.

free avg is pretty good and wont cost you a penny although i use nod32

[Northants Girly]

Yep - AVG is free and has good write-ups too.

I also have Zonealarm firewall - also free

[dave the scaffolder]

PM Onkar hes a computer whizzz DTS Dave XXX XXX

[Robin]

Personally, I have installed corporate norton (symantec) for about 500 users - its hard to beat if you can find a single license its pretty good - unobtrusive ( as opposed to retail norton) and catches pretty much everything you are likely to encounter. Doesn;t have anything else in it so you;ll need something like zonealarm or if you are using windows vista, the built in firewall is not too bad. won;t catch things "dialling home" but will stop incoming stuff.

[RedFox]

Today my subscription for Norton has expired which I have found not billiant at all. What protection have you got on your pc. I have no idea which one to choose. Need to get something installed soon before I land up with lots of viruses.

For anti-virus protection:

• ESET NOD32 Antivirus 3.0 (not the Smart Security product)

And for other issues (all freeware)

• ZoneAlarm Free Firewall

• Spybot Search and Destroy

• SpywareBlaster

• Secunia Personal Software Inspector

[DavidY]

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread - but this may be of interest to some people.

If you use Barclays Online banking, they're doing an offer whereby you can download Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 for free (for up to 3 computers).
Internet Security Offer -Barclays

It seems to be the full commercial product - and although I don't know much about Kaspersky, I have heard of them and this particular product did get a good write-up in Personal Computer World magazine.

I was looking for the catch (why give something away for free?) but I guess that from Barclays' point of view, it might even save them money overall if fewer of their customers get hit by phishing emails, stolen credit card numbers etc.

[Cruella]

OK, I'm showing my ignorance but I'm always keen to learn. I use Norton purely because I have always had that on my computer. Can someone explain (in plain English, no technical jargon) exactly what does what. Such as what a firewall does etc.

[Poi Boi]

I use AVG security suite, it has a firewall, spybot protection and virus scanner, plus a whole load of other stuff that protects you computer. It's easy to use and unobtrusive. I bought it from Amazon off a seller for much cheaper than advertised online and the CD arrived the next day. A great piece of software installed on my laptop and PC and it does a very good job.

[robd]

Firewall - blocks unauthorised/unsolicited access to your computer from computers on the other side of the firewall (a firewall may be on your PC or it could be on the device that connects you to the internet or both) . Most firewalls (but not the inbuilt Win XP one IIRC) also block unauthorised/unsolicited access from your computer to other computers

Anti Virus - scans files to check for known viruses and if it finds one may delete it or 'quarantine' it. Some scanners also check against certain patterns of behaviour which, they claim, enables them to catch viruses that are not yet known.

I have never used anti virus on my home machines - I find the performance hit is too great and it's more trouble than it's worth. However I am generally the sole user of my machine and I appreciate that it's a different situation if you have other family members using it (and opening unsolicited email attachments, etc )

[Cruella]

Thank you Robd. I think we had Spybot search and destroy too, does that do anything that Norton doesn't? Or can it be removed?

[martingold]

Thank you Robd. I think we had Spybot search and destroy too, does that do anything that Norton doesn't? Or can it be removed?

spybot search and destroy detects and removes spyware as aposed to nortons which protects you against viruses
definatly do not remove it and you should run a scan with it every so often
I also run lavasofts Adaware (make sure you go to lavasoft to get this as there are several dodgy versions) as a combination of a decent anti virus, a firewall and these two programs will catch just about everything that the internet can throw at you

[DavidY]

spybot search and destroy detects and removes spyware as aposed to nortons which protects you against viruses

It depends which Norton product you're using - some of the Norton products have spyware features as well as anti-virus.

[Dreadful Scathe]

It depends which Norton product you're using - some of the Norton products have spyware features as well as anti-virus.

most Norton products ARE spyware

[martingold]

most Norton products ARE spyware

I dont like either the norton or mcafee products i have used
soooo slow and obtrusive

[straycat]

I used to swear by AVG, but nowadays it seems to be going the way of Norton. Nowadays, I use ClamWin. Also free, and Clam is pretty much the de facto open source anti virus system these days.

[Agente Secreto]

most Norton products ARE spyware

I don't like many of the integrated security packages I've tried and of course if you know what you're doing then you can easily assemble your own set of protection measures.

However, for those people that are not confident enough to manage their risks by assembling their own suite of protection measures, or simply don't want to spend the time doing this (I'm in this latter category myself), then Norton or McAfee fills a useful void. These products are designed to work for those people that understand very little - so by nature they'll be obtrusive. However, once the packages are set up and running I rarely get any comments from the wife or kids about the security suite being in their face.

Personally I use Norton/Symantec right now - the product does annoy me and I really dislike the way that backup works, but the range of functionality I get from it allows me to get the best balance of protection v effort for a desktop that is used by 3 kids as well as myself and the wife. The 3 license deal is good since I can deploy it on the 2 laptops I've got as well. I'm looking around for a change when the current license expires in the summer and I'm probably going to try the Zonealarm Suite from Checkpoint this time round. I've done this in the past though and keep coming back to the Norton products in the end - maybe its just familiarity with them or could simply be that I'd rather be dancing than messing around with security software at home

Agent 000
Licensed to Dance

[Robin]

I used to swear by AVG, but nowadays it seems to be going the way of Norton. Nowadays, I use ClamWin. Also free, and Clam is pretty much the de facto open source anti virus system these days.

Whilst it is a good product, for most people it needs to be automatic - quote from their website "Please note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware."

Which means that people have to know what they are doing - ie scan manually.

Personally I have found the new version of symantec corporate is pretty ok - includes basic firewall, anti trojan etc and it has a fairly low resource hit (other than at startup if you have a scan enabled). It can also be locked down so no-one can disable it or muck about with the settings which is a real bonus !

[Dreadful Scathe]

Firewall - blocks unauthorised/unsolicited access to your computer from computers on the other side of the firewall (a firewall may be on your PC or it could be on the device that connects you to the internet or both) . Most firewalls (but not the inbuilt Win XP one IIRC) also block unauthorised/unsolicited access from your computer to other computers

Yes the windows firewall does not block outgoing access. The reason this is important is, if you ever do get a virus/trojan on your computer that tries to connect to a server, you will not be warned and it can download more things with impunity.

Anti Virus - scans files to check for known viruses and if it finds one may delete it or 'quarantine' it. Some scanners also check against certain patterns of behaviour which, they claim, enables them to catch viruses that are not yet known.

Extra overheads of course, and they will also highlight anything flagged as possibly pirated as dodgy too, to steer you onto the straight and narrow. A friend once accidently deleted perfectly good CTDC remote access software from my machine when the virus checker flagged it up - it was both legitimate and legal. Luckily my virus collection was on an external drive .

I have never used anti virus on my home machines - I find the performance hit is too great and it's more trouble than it's worth. However I am generally the sole user of my machine and I appreciate that it's a different situation if you have other family members using it (and opening unsolicited email attachments, etc )

I don't like many of the integrated security packages I've tried and of course if you know what you're doing then you can easily assemble your own set of protection measures.

The first measure of protection is general computer awareness - scanning software is an extra check that shouldnt be needed. I would always recommend a firewall if your router doesnt handle it, but thats all you really need You don't need a virus checker if you are not daft enough to download viruses

These products are designed to work for those people that understand very little - so by nature they'll be obtrusive. However, once the packages are set up and running I rarely get any comments from the wife or kids about the security suite being in their face.

Yes they do calm down a bit, but I would disagree that "by nature they'll be obtrusive" - if they are aimed at the non-IT literate, they really should be almost invisible.

[Robin]

if they are aimed at the non-IT literate, they really should be almost invisible.

Agree - but thats rubbish marketing isn't it ?

Why would you buy it again if it was completely silent and doing its job properly ?