I'm done with Norton Anti-Virus...where to now?

[Frequitude]

I'm sick of Norton Anti-Virus. I'm sick of it causing my computer to take an hour to boot up and I'm sick of it slowing down my system to a crawl.

What anti-virus software do you recommend?

Some priorities are:
-I don't mind paying for it but of course free is cool.
-Fairly hands off
-not a resource hog

Thanks all

[I_H8_Crawford]

I use Avast free version and quite enjoy it.

[Komskies]

Try taking a look at this great thread by OilKiller:

http://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthr...ght=anti-virus

[calculoso]

Kaspersky

[Mazrim]

I use Avast as well and couldn't be happier.

[puckluck]

Avast is great and free. Download.com is where you'll find it.

[FanIn80]

Kaspersky is your friend.

[mykalberta]

Microsoft Security Essentials seems to work for me.

I also use Avast

[Azure]

Microsoft Security Essentials.

[Phaneuf3]

Stay far far away from McAfee

[Sample00]

+1 for Avast

[Rathji]

Don't touch MacAfee with a 10 foot pole.

I use Microsoft Security Essentials.

Avast seemed ok, and used a little bit less resources, but it was always bugging me to download the new version.

Here is a nice graph that was posted in Oilkillers thread.

[WilsonFourTwo]

I ditched NAV about 18 months ago because I found it (personal opinion) too piggish, slow and not nearly as reliable as it used to be.

As part of picking a new App, I've been running AVG on my desktop and Microsoft Essentials on laptop ever since. Frankly, they both work perfectly fine, to the point where I'm not even bothering to put them both on the same App.

Go with either of them.....you'll be satisfied.

[Jimmy Stang]

+1 For Avast. I use the free version at home and I liked it so much I got the office to cough up for some licenses here. AVG used to be pretty good but the more recent versions seem to be a little bloated, although admittedly it has been a couple of years since I moved away from it.

Speaking of bloat, Norton and McAfee are notorious for it.

Never really tried Kaspersky, but I have heard good things from the techie-types.

[sclitheroe]

None. Keep a scheduled nightly Acronis image of your system, keep your software patched up, and use virtual machines set to non-persistent mode if you really must venture into the unsavoury parts of the internet for software, keygens, cracks, movies, etc.

The non-persistent VM is the greatest thing in the world - its a VM, fully configured, that doesn’t save disk writes across sessions. Each time you use it, when you close the VM, the writes are lost and it reverts to its previous state. In essense, it can never get infected other than for the duration of a single use.

The performance of VMWare workstation is so good right now on decent hardware with lots of RAM, that there’s almost zero excuse to do anything with untrusted code outside a VM.

Test in your VM, and promote software to the native side of your machine when it passes muster.

[sa226]

I 4th Kaspersky.

Seems to run well, not a resource hog and if you do some research its among the top if not the top in most AV stats

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

The non-persistent VM is the greatest thing in the world - its a VM, fully configured, that doesn’t save disk writes across sessions. Each time you use it, when you close the VM, the writes are lost and it reverts to its previous state. In essense, it can never get infected other than for the duration of a single use.

Hey nice tip on the non-persistent VM thing. I didn't even realize that was a feature...

[photon]

NOD32 is another good pay one. I use MSE.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Phaneuf3

Stay far far away from McAfee

I second this.

Norton version 2.0 it is.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Hey nice tip on the non-persistent VM thing. I didn't even realize that was a feature...

Oh, its wonderful.