McAfee, Norton, or Other

vanagon40

I need to get virus protection for my home computer and a college student laptop. I'm on a trial version of McAfee at home, and student has none (which is the topic of another thread). So my question is should I get McAfee, Norton, or something else?

Cost is definitely a consideration.

Both computers surf the web a substantial amount. Both are Windows XP using IE (or AOL browser) primarily.

Straight_Man

Given that you have one protected computer and one unprotected, that you are a student, and that you need something that updates often to handle threats that can pop up at random and are happening faster and faster these days, I would look at F-Prot and Bitdefender. Both have been used to protect email vectors for Widnwos boxes, on Linux. I like F-Prot better than Bitdefender on XP, and Bitdefender better than XP on Linux. I've looked at and used about 13 major kinds of AV over the years. Both are better at detecting trojan class viral things than are McAfee of non-enterprise kinds, NAV, or PC-Cillin, and trojans are often used for box hijacking intro things these days. Both are paid for. The best licensing deal for end users with more than one box that I have found is F-Prot's bulk license, at $50.00 per year for up to ten computers. I tend, when new outbreaks are found, to be getting DAILY virus def updates automatically, and have gotten more than one per day from them. PCWorld featured F-Prot Professional AV as a highlighted download in the daily download newsletter, and F-Prot cooperates with Kaspersky Lab's AV solutions. The multiuser edition is at version 3.14e righjt now, the ten-pack license is $50.00 per year and this thing is tiny and uses very few resources on computer. The interface you will neeed to learn, you can get help from me as to details of use. It uses both very good heuristics and a bunch of classes of protection for windows, that totals over 115,420 thousand defs defs for know viral kind things right now. You can update manually or automatically, but would say to update once per day per box.

AV is best used to kill on entry, and F-Prot does that very well. Legally, your family could have all ts computers protected for $50.00 per year.

I can also say this-- with F-Prot on my XP box, which is online 24\364 about, I have not had to reload XP in quite few months and the tools we are saying to kill off things here find nothing when run weekly on same box.

The free way would be to switch to Something that woudl not RUN Windows viruses, but then you will have learning curve-- Linux or Linspire are probbaly the best ways tio get email and not have viruses load whether or not you click on the email attachments. They simply cannot run, Linux is alien enough to not load or run them. Because it is alien to Widnwos users, plan on a lot of learning time.

Best general advice is to pay for AV protection, and to get things that kill trojans as well as worms and pure viruses. Most new malwares are hybrids, trojans or worms at core. Most of the new viruses are hybrids, either they resue code plus use new code, or they have a trojan and worm and virus replication embedded.

Try going to http://www.f-prot.com/ and http://www.bitdefender.com/ and grab the trials.

vanagon40

Let me clarify, I'm not a student, my daugher is.

I do not mind paying for virus protection, but price is a consideration. In other words (and this probably dates me), I'll take the Chevy rather than the Cadillac.

JB

check with your daughter...my school (and many others around the nation) offer free antivirus programs. We have Norton Coporate here and it works well.