Antivirus/Utility Soft Recommendation?

[Gurm]

Well Folks,

I'm shopping around for antivirus software. I know I need it nowadays, and Norton 2003 is soooooooo yucky.

I've used Norton for years now, but 2003 is so slow and so ugly and so resource hungry that it makes my machine CRAWL.

I tried McAfee, and while it was much lighter, it also has a nasty tendency to corrupt itself and my system. (yuk!)

I suppose I could just drop back to Norton 2002, but I'm not 100% sure it will continue to catch the latest nasties out there.

Also, I'm abandoning Norton Utilities at last. The fact that Disk Doctor no longer integrates with Windows was the last straw there. I've pretty much decided on Disk Keeper to replace Speed Disk and Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional to replace Disk Doctor (and do a bunch of other cool stuff as well).

Anyone have any thoughts, though?

I've looked at:

Panda Antivirus: This product, although highly recommended, looks and feels like a Windows 3.1 program. The installer is straight out of 1992, and the interface is horrific. UPDATE: The new version 7.0 now looks like a Windows 95 program. I _guess_ this is an improvement. Why do I get the feeling, though, that these people are working with an 8-year-old version of Borland C++ as their development environment?

Kaspersky: This product used to rock. Now it is just ugly and difficult to understand... unless they've gotten a lot better in the last 6 months.

- Gurm

[Electric Amish]

AVG

https://www.grisoft.com

It's free and it rocks...

amish

[Taz]

You wouldn't have thought that writing a nice UI for an AV program would be that difficult, it certainly appears to be from what's out there

I decided to stick with Norton 2002, does the job and has a decent enough UI.

[Nuno]

I suppose I could just drop back to Norton 2002, but I'm not 100% sure it will continue to catch the latest nasties out there.

I think that´s more a matter of keeping the Virus definitions up to date than having the latest versions that for the most part, only have cosmetic improvements and bloatware. If the virus code is on the virus definitions, I guess the search engine will have to be too crapy not to identify it. If you note, the Symantec autoupdater exe file is backward compatible even with Norton Utilities for Windows 95!

I still use NAV 2001 (it was bundled with something I don´t remember now) and it serves me well.

[Guru]

I use a F-secure managment server that updates the rest of the network!

McAfee suxs and I never liked Norton myself Panda is ok!

[DentyCracker]

Kaspersky works well for me. Funny enuf Diskeeper fecks up my system after a few weeks. Happened in WinXP and now WinXPsp1. I prefer its interface to O&O but now I am using the latter and so far it hasn't fecked my system up.

[thop]

kaspersky, the thread can be closed

[Admiral]

I heard many good things about Kaspersky's AVP and many people here seem to be using it, though it locks my system in 2k or XP so I'm "stuck" with NAV 2002.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Diskeeper fried my XP sp1 partition too, great software. NAV2k2 has been working fine for me for virus checking, although I never liked any of the Norton Utility packages.

[Technoid]

hm...
I uppgraded to NAV2003 because my "time" was running out and I haven't noticed a bit....

Are you sure NAV diden't revert to "I'm a feking stopid idiot and scans every file even if they can't carry viruses" mode?

That seriously slows down a system....

[Gurm]

There's a new version of Disk Keeper that supposedly integrates better with XP. Which versions were causing trouble for people?

As for McAfee, it's version 7 that seems to have lots of problems. Version 6 was great - under Win2k. For XP it locks up.

So people still say AVP is good, eh? Does it integrate well with things? Check Outlook e-mails? Not too much CPU power?

- Gurm

[Jon P. Inghram]

Diskeeper 7, it torched my SP1 partition when it did a boot time defragmention run. NAV2k2 runs fine on my system, although I turn off the auto-protect and just use email and scripting protection. I wish they'd implement a plug-in or something that'd interface with IE and scan anything you download though your browser. That'd be a really handy way of virus scanning without dragging down system performance.

[Gurm]

Yah, I'm tempted to turn off auto protect, but I _KNOW_ that the one time I forget to scan a recently-downloaded file before running it will be the one time that I get nailed.

And just IE wouldn't help - it'd have to interface with GetRight, BitBeamer, etc.

- Gurm

[DirtFarmer]

Norton 2003 does some a bit of a hog, some customers have been complaining about sluggishness after the install. We have seen the Panda AV products performing very well over the last 18months, in customer boxes. Very very few infections when auto update is configured, and permanent protection is enabled. Lots more getting by the Norton 2002, for whatever reason. Signature updates DAILY on Panda. McAfee may have a good product now but I've seen it bend to many machines out of shape. I uninstall more McAfee AV than I install.

[K6-III]

Nothing better than the free AVG Antivirus: www.grisoft.com