Ugggg. I guess I too am one of those experimenting. But by necessity not chance. My Symantec antivirus subscription ran out but they wanted me to upgrade SystemWorks which I declined to do. So deleted all that and tried AVG. It would not check my mail so I then uninstalled and tried Antivir. Well, the system shield would periodically shut down by itself and I can't have that. Uninstalled. Couldn't find a solution to either of these problems. So last nite I installed Avast. No complaints so far and it seems to work flawlessly. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I hate installing all these things. I saw what Symantec did to my system.....even after uninstalling it left stuff all over (though happily it doesn't seem to be causing a problem).
You won't have to worry with avast!. Stay with avast!. You have superior protection in avast! I wrote the following article yesterday in a Comcast Security Forum concerning why no one should use Norton or McAfee Antivirus:
Hello Comcast community,
Let me begin by saying although I am not an "expert" in this particular industry I do have quite a bit of user experience in this area.
In the offline world a big name or major name brand often equals the best quality and efficiency. However in the online world when it comes to software this is often not true. Norton and McAfee are the 800 pound guerillas in the antivirus industry but are they the best choices for virus protection?
Again I'm not an expert but I have used these products and many others and have read many independent online reviews and conclude:
Absolutely Not. Besides being the target of virus attacks themselves, these products require huge and let me emphasize,
H U G E amounts of system resources. Often slowing down your PC and functionality or slowing your boot up time significantly. This was the case with McAfee for me. It not only slowed my boot up time but required an undue amount of system resources, sometimes slowing video feeds and streaming media.
Also in my experience Norton failed to shield my computer from 5 trojan horses using it's Norton System Security Suite 2003. To add insult to injury I had to use another vendor to remove the infections as Norton was unable to.
Given the fact that about 500 new viruses are released each month, daily or near daily antivirus updates are necessary. However Norton Antivirus and McAfee Virusscan 9.0 only update once a week (I know McAfee 10.0 corrects this). This can leave you quite exposed to virus infections. Utilizing the New McAfee 10.0 I was recently hit with a very common virus know as "exploit-byte verify". Although Microsoft has released a patch blocking this exploit,
McAfee 10.0 missed this virus and it was only detected in a manual scan.People I haven't intended to write a book and I don't want to bore you so I'll get right to the point although I could go on and on about the inefficiencies of Norton and McAfee.
There are several better alternatives out there and the one in particular that I use and am thrilled by is avast! Available at
www.avast.com. No, I'm neither an employee or affiliate of this product but since the release of the new 4.6 version I have become a big fan of this product. The funny thing about avast! is that previous versions of this product did not impress me too much but with this new and updated version it has become a clear winner in my opinion. Oh and need I mention it is
FREE for home use! avast! is complete protection for your computer. This is not some demo version or stripped down version of it's Professional version like AVG another well known free antivirus product.
avast! is
very light on system resources and provides much better
real-time detection than both Norton and McAfee. When you go to the avast! website just click on the link in the middle of the page that says desktop solution then scroll to the bottom and click the link that says FREE avast! home addition and you can read all about the superior protection of this product and download it for free. For what it's worth you can also choose what ever skin or look you want for avast! after you have downloaded it. I for one don't like the default skin so I changed it to the one of my choice.
If you decide to dump Norton or McAfee and you should!, your probably wondering what you'll use for firewall protection. Not to worry the best firewalls are also Free! Just go to
www.download.com which is a CNet website and you can either download Kerio, Sygate or ZoneAlarm for free.
