Virus protection?

My Norton Anti Virus that i got free with my laptop has just expired. Its £40 to renew for a year. Any suggestions for a cheaper/free alternative that will protect me from those evil cyber terrorists?

 

Avast. Excellent, and free.

http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000375,39313066s,00.htm

 

AVG: www.grisoft.com

Also excellent and free for personal use.

Norton, on the other hand, qualifies as a virus by itself.

 

Use Mozilla Firefox along with the NoScript and AdblockPlus extensions and most important of all don't click on links that look too good to be true then you would not need to burden your machine with anti virus and anti spyware software at all.

 

I suggest you try nod32 http://www.eset.com/ on a 30 day trial. Best AV I've used by far.

 

There seems to be a division of opinion here; my local mate, whose into comp in quite a big way.........just mention Norton the once to see him bounce around on one leg then go into a seizure....

My Dad on the other hand swears by it....

Avast was recommended to me 6 months ago, by this forum ....and I heven't had a problem.

 

A debatable statement??

 

I'll second AVAST and the fact that Norton ca be a virus in itself -its just trying to be too cleaver for its own good.

Also tried AVG and would say that AVAST suited m,e better - fewer issues with compatibility etc.

 

seconded

Nod32 has the best "in the wild" detection rates of any of the AVs, it isn't too expensive either

as for free ones, AVG tends to come out on top

Using common sense when downloading stuff is the best AV though

 

Seems I have AVG not avast after all!!

shows how much I know!

The only thing I would say is that it seems to take 5 mins when first starting up to download stuff.....and the computer won' t do much else in that period. I don't know whether thats a good thing or a bad thing.......can be annoying.........

 

Why not give it a go for a couple of months without virus or spyware protection and then return for an informed debate?

If while trying the Mozilla things you do manage to catch a virus or spyware related infection please make a note of the site so we can debate just why this approach may have failed. I tried this method for a couple of months on a MS XP machine and suffered no ill effects but I have since moved onto a Ubuntu Linux system that has no need for anything other than Firefox, AdBlockPlus and NoScript to keep me safe.

YMMV

 

Cheers chaps. I'll try Avast I think as I've heard that recommended elsewhere too. £40 saved!

 

Another product I would make mention of is PrevX anti-malware - it is a very interesting licensing scheme such that if it never detects anything for you, you never need to pay for it. Once it has detected something and you use PrevX to fix it, it starts a 30 day countdown, after which it will still detect things for you and you can manually remove them, but you have to pay for auto removal.

 

I'm not a techy by any stretch, Auric...I just know that at one time I was running a computer without AVSW....promptly picked one up, which (I was told) nearly trashed the mother board (= effcetively a new computer)

lesson learnt

Thats the only reason I say I wouldn't run without some form of AV software...bitter experience!

I suspect its only going to get worse, too.

?

 

Norton makes me so rich It really really is the most awful piece of software ever made for the PC.

PS Its virtually impossible for a virus to destroy a motherboard these days the operating system stops the software developer from doing something stupid. There were some that destroyed the firmware on hard drives but again its not really easy to do any more.

I use AVG myself because it works very well on older PCs and newer alike.