Free Antivirus

[GrandAdmiral]

Seriously, do some research before you slam programs. Symantec corporate is one of the best anti-viruses available, by almost any measure, resource usage, reliability, customer support, scanning rate.

He's right about "Norton."

Norton 08 has the worst start up speed of any major AV application which is why it gives you the largest performance boost when you uninstall it from a Dell than any other application that comes loaded on one of their new machines. Thats based on research and experience.

The scanning performance which does not affect the performance of your machine when there is no scan taking place ranges from mediocre to good. However its idle performance is poor. Norton is also about 5 or 6 times more bloated than most AV applications. Nod32 blows Norton away by a huge margin in the performance area with quite a few competitors in between.

Whats funny is the manual that comes with Norton it says your computer will run slower after the application is installed. This is after the large performance increase over Norton 07. It used to be much worse.

Norton's detection is good. Not the best there are quite a few apps that are on par or better.

Norton also does not uninstall cleanly and they have provided a separate tool just to uninstall the app.

I could go on but Norton anti-virus is not so good.

 

[Agent Cooper]

We had Norton at my workplace (it was pre-installed on the PC) but decided to can it when the pre-paid period ran out - waaay to many complications using it and the machine was pretty much useless for any other tasks when Norton performed the automated interval scans.

We have a free AV now and it's no hazzle at all - why would anyone pay for a AV programme when you can find freeware doing the task just as well or better? Ignorance I guess....

At home I've always had AV freeware - AVG and now Avast! I've heard that Kaspersky is the one to get if you wanna buy an AV programme.

 

[CaptainF]

Norton is such a sh*tty program, it's really hard to believe. I'm running anti-virus on my computer and it's easily one of the worst, most bloated, useless programs ever devised.

I really wanna scrap it. Now. What are some good free replacements?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Norton is such a sh*tty program, it's really hard to believe. I'm running anti-virus on my computer and it's easily one of the worst, most bloated, useless programs ever devised.

I really wanna scrap it. Now. What are some good free replacements?

If you're asking that question, it would seem you didnt read this thread at all.

 

[CaptainF]

If you're asking that question, it would seem you didnt read this thread at all.

Ah, just checked the posts and it looks like AVG and Avast! are both pretty good...my bad.

 

[Pokurcz]

I have Avira AntiVir, its free, and both less resouce hoging and better looking than AVG.
I did not like AVG that much.

 

[boarder]

Yes I also got rid of Norton first thing on my comp, I find that AVG works really well for me.