Anti-virus software that doesn't turn your PC into a sloth?

I've seen XP crash a lot, but then I am a pro developer and I'm doing things that occasionally run amok - for instance, I crashed this machine here at work by running recursive Perl scripts over a file-system. It crashed the entire machine. That was only a couple of days back. A decent OS would have allowed me to recover, and actually to be fair to XP normally it'd have done so, but on this occasion the machine basically stopped responding entirely.

I've also found random crashes on all manner of PC apps, from Office to VS.NET to third party stuff like Photoshop. All on well-maintained machines (my company has almost 150,000 staff and an IT budget in > £1bn/year, so can't afford to and won't cut corners (i.e. everything is well supported and maintained), but is sadly locked into NT4 except for us priviledged dev lot who get XP. Comparing XP to NT4 makes one realise just how far Windows has come, but it's still a long way short of the stability of my OS of choice, OSX.)

On the other hand, I've personally found W2K/AS to be rock solid reliable, and haven't had a crash* in four years of 24/7 use for my own projects.

John

* that was attributable to a Windows problem as opposed to something I personally did, e.g. threading issues.

 

I have two PC's, a work laptop and a home laptop. both siemens . they use something called software and have a television type thing connected to a typewriter.

the vast majority of the time they work fine - is there anything else i need to know?

 

I can strongly recommend EZ Antivirus from Computer Associates.

http://store.ca.com/dr/sat4/ec_Main...1&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=179788


1) It's MUCH cheaper than McAfee, Norton etc
2) It has a MUCH smaller footprint. In other words it doesn't slow up the machine in any noticable way (even on a relatively slow machine).
3) It does everything an AV should (ie real time, email protection etc)
4) It's FAST !! Much faster at scanning files and folders than any other I've used.
5) It's caught every virus that my machine has ever been exposed too and in over 5 years I've never been infected.


As far as software firewalls are concerned. I use Sygate. It's a good firewall but it's not as easy to use as a lot of the others. It's definitely aimed more at people that have an understanding of how IP works.

GTM