Which Anti Virus/Internet Security Suite ?

[RB (Andrew)]

Hi guys,

I'm looking for some advice on which AV/I Security Suite people recommend.
In the process of upgrading my systems ATM and what to try some of the other offerings out there (I've been using Norton's for a few years).

Any suggestions most appreciated.

I've heard Zone Alarm and Kaspersky are good and one review recommends Norton's 360 but I don't really want to go back to Norton's.

Thanks in advance.

[h0ughy (David)]

I find AVG is a nice solid suite plus it has a free antivirus and antispam if needed

[Terry B]

I use Vet. Seems OK

[vash (Ashley)]

I use avg free too not much of a resource hog and it does a good job.
AS for a firewall I have a router and that does as a good a job as any firewall.

[RB (Andrew)]

Thanks guys, I'll check out AVG.
I didn't realise VET was still around although now it looks like it goes under the name CA.

[acropolite (Phil)]

If you're willing to pay you can't go past NOD32. It wins every comparitive shootout and treads very lightly on resources. The Australian support is excellent. I use AVG at home but Nod32 at work. I'm with vash re the router, I have used router firewalls at home and work with no problems for many years.

[Ric]

I use Vet on the desktop and Nortons on the lappy and I'm happy with both of them.

Cheers

[OneOfOne (Trevor)]

I have Norton 360 on my computer at home, and although it seems to do a good job (but then again my wife's teenage daughter doesn't even know I have wireless internet on my computer and laptop) it seems to hog CPU time at times. I can be using the computer and all of a sudden it gets noticably slower. If I look at TaskManager, Nortons is chewing up the CPU and thrashing the disk. It is, however, quite easy to use.

If I was choosing again, I might go for something else that does not get so greedy.

Problem with all this virus stuff is that eventually a scan will take a full 24 hours! So you will have to allocate one of the CPUs to do a continuous scan...it will be a sad day

[mrsnipey]

Another for Nod32.

[Zuts]

Hi,

I have been using AVG free for years and it works for me. It is light on resources and scans your emails as they come in.

That combined with a natted router will act as a firewall and protect you from the internet worms which wont see your pc as it has a local net IP.

If you decide to open up some ports on the router, say to run a web server or to access your pc from work then most routers these days also have a firewall capability.

Paul

[RB (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by acropolite

If you're willing to pay you can't go past NOD32. It wins every comparitive shootout and treads very lightly on resources. The Australian support is excellent. I use AVG at home but Nod32 at work. I'm with vash re the router, I have used router firewalls at home and work with no problems for many years.

Originally Posted by mrsnipey

Another for Nod32.

Yes I've only heard good things about NOD32.
I've been waiting for my Norton's subscription to expire so I could change over to something else.

So is the Router sufficient as a firewall?
I've only got it in default mode, firewall is 'on', do I need to get in there and set up a specific configuration?

Originally Posted by OneOfOne

I have Norton 360 on my computer at home, and although it seems to do a good job... it seems to hog CPU time at times.
If I was choosing again, I might go for something else that does not get so greedy.
(

I've read that 360 is a better version than previous Norton's but still quite CPU intensive.
Now that I've done a clean install on my lappy I want to do some free trial periods of the various suites on offer and see how we go.

Originally Posted by Zuts

Hi,

I have been using AVG free for years and it works for me. It is light on resources and scans your emails as they come in.

That combined with a natted router will act as a firewall and protect you from the internet worms which wont see your pc as it has a local net IP.

If you decide to open up some ports on the router, say to run a web server or to access your pc from work then most routers these days also have a firewall capability.

Paul

Cheers Paul.

Thanks guys

[Glenhuon (Bill)]

My nod goes to AVG with Firewall, reasonably priced and hardly notice its there working away in the background. Dumped Norton a couple of years back, only one that ever let 2 viruses through and couldn't clean them without a vist to the Symantec website. I believe the latest one is still a resource hog, and darn difficult to remove. Leaves bits of itself all over the system. Spyware is taken care of by Spyware Doctor from PCtools, IMO the best of the bunch.

Bill

[g__day (Matthew)]

I know a major Bank did a review and selected Zone Alarms Pro as by far the best.

[Zuts]

Hi RB,

As long as your router is set up as DHCP server and gives you a local address (usually in range 192.168.x.y) then this is the only firewall you need. This is because anyone outside your network just cant see your machine. They can attack your router via its external IP maybe but generally this is fruitless.

You still need anti virus as you can still download bad stuff or click on a bad email and so on.

If however you need to set up services and use ip forwarding to allow connections from the outside world then you would generally turn the firewall facility on the router on.

This does not include the usual ports (80, 443) which are always open and forwarded to your local ip as otherwise you could not browse the internet.

Regards Paul

[GTB_an_Owl (Geoff)]

sent you a Pm Andrew

geoff

[RB (Andrew)]

Just an update:

I've decided to use the new Nod32 ESET AV suite and am very happy with it's performance, I've been using it now for well over a month.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions, I also tried ZoneAlarms Pro which was excellent too but I preferred Nod ESET.

Easy to setup and unobtrusive and doesn't seem to be bloatware.
Great anti-spam filtering and top notch firewall.
I actually ended up buying it through a dealer here on IIS.

Also found a link to enable me to completely remove my old installation of Norton's.
If anyone ever wants to remove Norton's completely, visit and follow the instructions:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...05033108162039

[OneOfOne (Trevor)]

A couple of days ago I just needed to check a few things on the net and everytime I wanted to click on something, Nortons seemed to send the hard drive into a frenzy. Usually about 5 minutes or so after I start the computer up, the hard drive goes crazy for several minutes. Looking at task manager I see the only thread making masses of disk accesses is one of the norton systems. Eventually I gave up trying to do my searches and decided instead to download AVG and to update my Ad-Aware. On Saturday, I spent some time removing Nortons (it really didn't want to go!) and found AutoUpdate was still there and refused to uninstall, so I followed the link in an earlier posting in this thread.

Well, my computer is much more usable today (Sunday) and searches run at the sort of speed I would expect from cable.

[Dooghan (Dooghan)]

Has anyone used Blink http://www.eeye.com/html/products/blink/index.htm

Looks like an interesting program that has a firewall, AV, spyware scanner and zero day attack protection. I'm interested in seeing if anyone has used it and is it any good?

[acropolite (Phil)]

An additional point with Nod32, it can be set up as a multi user, so if you have 2 or more machines, one can be used to distribute the downloaded updates to the others.

[shane shaw]

CA Internet Security Suite

this is the old Vet anti virus software. I have used it for many years and never had a problem. I had previously used nortons and had heaps of problems.,