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The Definitive "BEST ANTIVIRUS" thread

Asked by MxxCon,

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Best Antivirus  

1414 members have voted

  1. 1. Best Antivirus

    • Norton/Symantec
      665
    • McAfee
      115
    • AVG
      201
    • NOD32
      131
    • PC-Cilin
      52
    • Panda
      33
    • Kaspersky
      103
    • Other
      107
    • F-Prot
      7

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576 answers to this question

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Enthusiast

esortm

Posted
Posted

Currently use NAV 2002 on two home computers. Looking to move to another product because of the system resources Norton hogs. I'm thinking NOD32 or Avast. I like the results of NOD32 at virusbulletin.com, but the free price tag on Avast peaks my interest. Any thoughts/comments from users of these two products? Thanks in advance for any responses.

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Grand Master

+Random Stranger Subscriber¹

Posted
  • Subscriber¹
Posted (edited)
Can anyone tell me what is Symantec Antivirus Corporate edition?

What is its advantage and disadvantage compared to the home user's Norton Antivirus?

(Liveupdate subscriptions, user key, nore easy to disable by virus?....etc)

Symantec Antivirus is basically a stripped down from all bloated just version of norton antivirus. it has live update, live protect, email scanning and all that jazz, just in a simple interface without useless crap you see in norton.

the unmonitored client can work as independent desktop antivirus, while managed can connect to server version for central management.

i highly recommend the symantec corp client version over norton (been using norton since back in the day, tried corp recently)

also kaspersky is what i used previously and it was really good too, but i like the minimalism of symantec corporate client much better and it uses less memory.

here's screeny

Edited by sputnik
  • 0
Grand Master

mAcOdIn Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

You have to take those tests with a grain of salt because they mainly use zoo samples(which most independant AV tests use).

So you know zoo samples are samples that are not out spreading now which means you will probably never ever get one of them. ITW(In The Wild) samples on the otherhand are real virii that have been set loose on the public and therefore you may infact come into contact with one of them in your computing habits.

There's alot of arguing going on about whether these tests that use a persons compiled zoo collection is worth anything as an actual test.

The majority are samples that will never ever be encountered by a user so should an anti virus detect it when it's not even out there? Keep in mind the second some joker releases it and it starts infecting people it will be classified as ITW and then all the AV's will detect it.

Then you have DOS virii that can't even infect you at all. It makes sense somewhat to still scan for these as there's quite alot of 9x/Me users but for those of us on 2k/XP these things are worthless.

When it comes to trojans there's alot of BSing going around about trojans. I was on one forum and this guy had a zip with 7 "trojans" in it that NOD32 woudln't find so he freaked out, started converting everyone to Panda(which is a good AV by the way). Turns out they werent trojans but things that a trojan might use if it was included with a trojan. For instance there was one program that would hide a window so that the trojan would be completely hidden. By itself it is completely useless, it can't even hide a window because nothing has told it what to hide. Well Nod32 didn't find it. Another was a ftp program that is used by one of the common ftp server programs out there. Again completely benign unless a trojan was also directing it. Bottom line was out of the whole zip of 7 "trojans" there was maybe one real trojan in there. Now wether you want your AV to also detect the possible trojan tools is another toss up IMO. McAfee, the AV I use, did infact find all 7 "trojans" but at least it told me that they were "potentially unwanted programs" which means from that point it's up to me to make the final decision. For instance if I used servU FTP and it told me the servU FTP server was a potentially unwanted program I would leave it there. Some people seem to think everything related in any way is also a trojan must be a trojan and that's not true. One file didn't even work and couldn't infect you at all. But anyways that what alot of samples are in independant tests. Junk like this that isn't a real trojan but might be used as a trojan. Is it actually bad if an AV doesn't detect legitimate apps that could be used by trojans? In my opinion that's kinda like if my anti virus popped up with a warning saying: "Warning you are using Microsoft Windows XP. XP has commonly been used as a zombie machine, spam relay, and is easily infected by virii please remove now to uninstall windows" Is that what you want?

There's trickery like that in virii samples. Sometimes virii are messed up so they don't work. Should they be detected even though they're useless and can't infect? What about damaged files that are harmless but are the only sample a tester has? Should an AV detect a benign file damaged by a virus as an Actual Virus? I don't think so. Granted it's nice if your AV can detect it and possibly repair it but is that bad if it misses it?

Don't even get me started on spyware tests in a Anti Virus. That's a secondary feature at best and shouldn't even be included in a purchase decision especially when there's two very good if not completely better free solutions out there like Ad Aware and Spybot.

Learn the different kinds of virii, learn the distinction between zoo and itw, learn the difference between a trojan and "hacker tool"(as Kaspersky calls them) and then look at the independant tests again and you'll see what I mean. They're BS.

  • 0
Apprentice

Flyer72

Posted
Posted

I'm back to Avast! again, I just got tired of the manual updating of Antivir... I have used McAffee, Norton, Panda (all resource hogs), FreeAVG previously and Nod32. Nod32 is good, but it slowed down my computer more than Avast! even if it uses less resources???? I'm a little confused about that!

I'm still not sure if Avast! is the way to go so (I disabled a lot of stuff to speed things up) but considering I'm running an old Athlon 700 MHz with XP Pro it works pretty well!

  • 0
Mentor

Jexel

Posted
Posted

this is so stupid, Norton all the way! It provides regular updates however one thing i would like to see in the next version i.e. 2005 is that the automatic removal of added registry keys and values created by viruses and adware. It should also operate as a stronger adware remover in the future much more like adaware pro. However, if norton does incorporate advance adware removal Lavasoft will prob die

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