I'm a fan of MSE for home use where people are sensible, and Sophos for work as its good and easily managed via a network
Yes, it is. With the best will in the world, almost any reputable site can be hacked or hijacked. Basic AV and firewall should be the very first thing anyone thinks about when buying/building a computer. Avast, AVG or MSE will do most home users just fine.
I'm currently using AVG without issue, although I've run AVless in the past with no problems aswell. Redoing a couple of family computers this easter, and I'm putting MSE on them, not used it before, but heard good things, and doesn't look too bad.
How's AVG these days? Stopped using it a couple years back as it was a resource hog and kept telling me to enable a lot of extra crap to do with safe browsing i didn't want.
Dude do you not remember the sh*t patch they release in 2010 , the one where any machine running Mcafee Security enterprise 8.7 on windows xp sp3 would not boot any more it suspected the svchost.exe file was a viruse. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8636985.stm It was not very good anyway seen it many time where malware infected machine with mcafee on. I use kaspersky but will move to MSE.
It's still bloat, IMHO -- I only recommend it when a user can't install MSE. McAfee and Norton especially are terrible -- Norton specifically has been the cause of problems on a quite a few machines I've fixed.
If you are using Microsoft windows 7 than use Microsoft security essential its free and good antivirus and if you are going to purchase the new one than go for kaspersky.
Free: microsoft securoty essentials Paid: Sophos Also whenever you see a symantic product remember this: Symantic, where good software goes to die
I currently use AVG on most of my computers and Avast on one of them. The reason I don't use AVG uniquely is because on one PC (Win 7 x86), it keeps telling me to restart to complete an update every time I log in. Otherwise, AVG Free is my recommendation.
I have had no problems with Norton 360 I hardly know its on my computer getting 3% usage on 1 core and between 1-0 on the rest. I have had no problems with viruses or malware since I started using it but I don't Torrent or visit every porn site known to man ( I generally frequent the same sites). I usually get it for free every year I just have to mail in rebates so I haven't paid for Norton 360 or Internet securities for about 3 years.
I use McAfee as I get 5 free licences from our ISP but if you were to go free I would say go for MSE.
Well, that's more because someone at ms thought it was a good idea to have a generic host process. It isn't. And it is a common way to hide what you are up to. Used to be a big complaint from linux folk about it back when I was only linux.
PCPro did an article recently on anti virus. AVG Free came out on top in terms of catching the most viruses.
