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Which Anti-virus/Firewall do you use?

Which Anti-virus/Firewall do you use?

I was curious to find out which anti-virus/firewall programs people liked and used.

Over time I have tried a couple of different programs, and never been extremeley happy with them for various reasons.

I used Symantec/Norton for a while, and it had a tendency to crash my machine every time an update came out, requiring reverification with the company, unloading/reloading the program, etc.

At the moment I am using the McAfee Security Center Suite, and while it works reasonably well, it manages to chew up about 137MB of RAM according to the Processes window in the Task Manager. For a system that has a typical resting usage of about 350 to 400MB that seems like an awful lot to me.

A friend of mine recommended switching to the Grisoft AVG antivirus/firewall, which he said uses far less memory and catches quite a bit more than McAfee. I downloaded a free version and ran it once. It managed to detect three Trojans which McAfee had missed over months of use.

So the question is, for those of us who are just competent enough to unwittingly destroy our machines, but not so competent that we can delve into the minutiae of these programs, what would your recommendation be?

Ideally this would be a single source of programs designed to work together (the biggest selling point for the McAfee suite in my case), not a multi-sourced collection that may or may not work together depending on my ability to dig in and tweak drivers/settings/codes.

I await the collective wisdom with anticipation.
87,231 views 158 replies
Reply #152 Top

I use Eset Nod32 and Comodo on my XP Pro SP3 workstation and we use Microsoft Security Essentials on my wife's Windows 7 notebook.  We have dialup so the Eset is better for updating than the Microsoft Essentials.  Takes 10 minutes for the Nod32 and many hours for the Microsoft Essentials

Reply #153 Top

Microsoft Security Essentials and a hardware firewall.

Reply #154 Top

AVG/ Spyboy S&D/Windows Defender/Windows Firewall.

Used to have Norton on my laptop when it was new. Have it six months now and so far 6 Trojans, 3 virus' and umpteen malware had invaded my machine. That was with Norton. When my machine was new I assumed it came, like most, with the first 6 months free. Uh uh ... I got six weeks out of Norton then it quit. Since I dumped that trash and installed AVG and the rest I've had ZERO intrusions. Plus AVG gives you one FREE year, a whole year! Identity protection. And that's the free version. What does that say of Norton. Oh ... and McAffee ... I wouldn't take that if it were free.

Reply #155 Top

Been using Norton Anti-virus and firewall since I bought my pc 8 years ago and have never gotten anything....works like a charm and I don't even know it's there.

Reply #156 Top

AVG anitvirus and Comodo firewall, Advanced system care for the spyware crap.

Reply #157 Top

Well, in the course of the four years this thread has been running I've changes O/S's twice. Now on W7 I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free and it works!

Reply #158 Top

I have norton int.security 2011 and you never know its there and never had a virus.Only bought it as it was half price so when it runs out i will put in microsoft security essentials as the reviews are good.Will check for reviews on firewalls when the time comes.