Security Software for your PC

[Bob Hubbard]

I second that. Vipre found stuff AVG missed on 2 systems of ours.

 

[wushuguy]

Modern times you'd need anti-virus, anti-spyware, ant-rootkit, firewall, process-guards, etc. all of which will eat up system resources... quite ridiculous after a while. So, it is really helpful to learn some basic computer stuff to keep yourself safe, not just rely on the security software, because security software is always 1 or more steps behind the hackers anyway. If possible, take a look into OS more resistant to such threats. BSD or Linux come into mind, both of which can be burned on a live CD, which means you can try it before installing it on your computer, and it's free to download.

But, if you cant leave WIndows Vista, XP or such, then I would suggest kapersky or e-set software. Those seem to be top choices, but remember anti-virus isn't the be all end all for security, you need anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, process-guard, etc.

 

[Lynne]

We downloaded the free home edition of Avast. Guess what we got? A WIN32 virus was attached to Avast. It took a few months to do it's nasty work. It completely destroyed our file system. Last night, my daughter spent over 9 hours wiping our hard drive and reinstalling software.

Right now, we are using the free 30-day trial of AVG.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Did you get it from the right site?
http://www.avast.com/

 

[Lynne]

Did you get it from the right site?
http://www.avast.com/

It's been a few months, so I'm not sure. I remember seeing that Avast came out of the Czech Republic (supposedly). That page looks very familiar.

I'm thinking I was sent to a fake site.

 

[Xue Sheng]

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-professional.html

But I did not download it nore do I know much about the product. I only deal with enterprise versions of security software

 

[Shicomm]

I have at least one customer a week coming in with an infected machine that runs avg , avira or avast...
Tells me something about hte quality of the software...

Last time i checked all 3 still don't pick up the well spread wimad.X and getcodec.X worms .
Fact that the symantec ( norton ) and Network Assosiates ( mcaffee ) also still slip on those is just a minor detail offcourse...

Kaspersky is cheaper , has a lighter load on allmost all machines , updates every hour instead of once a day and according to the av-comparatives checks it scores better then quite a few others...

 

[mmartist]

Best antivirus software - Linux
Anyway for MS Windows you can stick to stock. That means Windows built in firewall + MS Security Essentials. Both are free (after you buy a copy of Windows) and do pretty good job, without annoying ads.

 

[MartialMellow]

The Mrs. and I have been doing well with Mcafee. We have a single PC with Windows XPS.

 

[crushing]

After the success we've had with Kaspersky at work I gave up on the free anti-virus software packages (AVG and Avast) at home and bought Kaspersky about a year and a half ago. Haven't had a problem since.

 

[Xue Sheng]

The Mrs. and I have been doing well with Mcafee. We have a single PC with Windows XPS.

If you are still running XP, hopefully it is XPSP3, you should know it reached Microsoft's End of Life in April and per Microsoft it will no longer be getting Security updates. Also per Microsoft and SANS, you should disable Internet Explorer since it is the main vector of an attack and use a different web browser be that Chrome, Firefox or something else. If you are not already doing this I highly recommend you do. However download and install your new browser before disabling IE otherwise you will have no way of getting to the web to download and install you new browser

 

[Buka]

Best antivirus software - Linux
Anyway for MS Windows you can stick to stock. That means Windows built in firewall + MS Security Essentials. Both are free (after you buy a copy of Windows) and do pretty good job, without annoying ads.

Been using Linux for four years now. No virus protection. It rocks, it really does.