Anti virus

[Tim Lamb]

Norton are kindly offering me an upgrade claimed to be compatible with Windows 8!

As I am still on XP service pack 3 are there any gotchas?

[John Williamson]

Yes, it's Norton. Get rid of it and install something, anything, else except McAfee.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free, as are AVG, Avast! and many others, all of which work better than Norton and use a fraction of the resources. I use Kaspersky, but only because it's the one supplied and recommended by my bank, so if it all goes horribly wrong on the banking front, I've got my due diligence sorted out.

[Ivan Dobsky]

I've been using Avast! for a couple of weeks now, and all seems good. I had been using AVG, but I was getting annoyed at the frequency with which it wanted me to reboot. I'll soon find out if Avast! is any better in this respect.

But as a network admin years ago, I was amazed how popular McAfee was. I found it to be terrible. Never tried Norton, but having tried a few Symantec things, I was never tempted to go near it. Which was a shame because I thought Norton made a few really good utilities in the old days.

[Brian Gaff]

Who knows but its bound to be slow on older hardware and may not even work properly in xp.

Brian

[Martin Brown]

Norton utilities in the very distant old days was good. Not so its modern offerings unless you are fond of resource hungry bloatware.

McAfee seems to combine the worst of all worlds. I marvel at the fact that so many corporate IT types inflict it upon their end users!

[Mentalguy2k8]

I haven't used an installed antivirus for a long time, a combination of good firewall (Online Armor Free in my case), common sense and a regular Malwarebytes scan keeps everything just fine at a fraction of the resource-cost of Norton. With perhaps an occasional "root kit" scan.

I do a thorough online virus scan once in a blue moon and it never finds anything except a few "false flag" files inside RAR archives that I knew about anyway.

I like Online Armor because it's set up to ask me about every new program that's trying to open, install, modify other programs, connect online etc, so I can see exactly what's going on. Probably not the best idea for complete beginners (like my father in law) who tick every box and click "yes" to everything, but in my experience it's caught everything dubious and given me the option to proceed or cancel. And revoke permissions retrospectively.

[Davey]

snip

Agreed on all counts. Norton started to delay the booting of my PC to the point where it was more than just stupid, so I dumped it, and have no regrets.

[Mentalguy2k8]

I'd be wary of any software maker that has deals in place to have their bloated stuff pre-installed on new PCs. Their paid "updates" are no different to Epson giving away printers but charging the earth for ink. "If you uninstall this software or refill your ink cartridges, bad things will happen to you & your family"

I had an uninvited copy of Norton on a new PC that I bought a few years ago, and you had to actually download *another* Norton program (not advertised but found via Google) to uninstall it properly, the preinstalled uninstall option left bits of it everywhere and crashed the OS. And even then you had to answer questions like "Hey, you do know you will die horribly if you uninstall this? Yes or No?". And of course, the Windows recovery disk that came with the PC wasn't actually a vanilla copy of Windows, it was the PC manufacturer's buggered-about-with copy of Windows so the unwary would re-install Windows after a major issue, and end up with all the crap again.

It's the same thing nowadays with Smartphones that come with crap like Spotify and cloud storage already loaded and can't be removed (unless you void your warranty and root the device). At least on a PC you can eventually get rid of this rubbish, it may take a few days but you'll get there.

[Peter Percival]

In the days of DOS they did. (So, 20 years or more ago.)

[Adrian]

^ THIS. He speaks the truth. Norton AV is a pile of steaming turd. It's not even a particularly _good_ pile of steaming turd at doing the basic job of an AV.

[polygonum]

"Popular" isn't a word that springs to mind re _any_ AV product! (Unless preceded by "un".)

Afraid I stick with MSE which seems to be undersold by MS (possibly to avoid war with other AV companies). Least intrusive. Have tried many over the years and each one has seen fit to piss me off. Was it AVG kept saying I had to start paying, but the next release freebie was already available?

I might have bought one or another but every single one has been hell-bent on proving that I should not spend any money on them.

[Peter Percival]

IRTA online amour!

[Whenever I see the word "martial" I thinks it's "marital".]

[Peter Percival]

And dumping Norton is a major task. MS uninstall leaves bits of Norton everywhere. I assume this is (for once) not MS's fault but rather due Norton's malice or stupidity.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

Yes, and Emsisoft provide an exceptionally good level of support, unlike any other a/v / firewall company I've ever dealt with.

I changed from Eset NOD32 & ZoneAlarm Pro to Emsisoft's Online Armor & Anti-malware products a few months ago, and am very happy. Neither are perfect, but the company are listening.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'm using AVG free on several machines and haven't had that problem. Except when the main software is upgraded, but this isn't often.

[Scion]

John Williamson put finger to keyboard:

Kaspersky is a fiver at 7 day shop

latest-2013-version although showing out of stock at the moment.

[Davey]

Agreed. Even after it was supposedly gone, I would occasionally get messages saying that it had detected something, rather like a zombie re-appearing from the grave. I finally killed it when I replaced the HDD and did a fresh install.

[Harry Bloomfield]

[Bod]

I know several guys who haven't used anti virus for years and never had a problem on Windows machines. I wouldn't risk it myself though.

[John Williamson]

Still got the floppy rescue set as well as the CD.