anti virus

thanks Barnett25 I will thats a good reminder. thanks Mike I have already downloaded avast I wished I had known.
 
Folks - herefollows my recent experience with Anti-virus software. Note that I am not a PC techie.

My personal laptop had ESET NOD32 running for the past year. No problems, updates were automated and ran regularly.
The family desktop had Panda running for the last 10 months. Also auto updates and no problems.

Both are due for renewal. I decided to cancel NOD32 as the licence is for 1 home PC. I thought I would renew Panda as it licences 3 home machines.

Before uninstalling NOD32 I ran a complete scan of my laptop hard drive and my external hard drives (using NOD32). One virus was found and deleted.

I then loaded Panda on the laptop. I soon encountered multiple problems:
Backups took forever as the AV would scan every file even during simple copies. Online access died as the AVENGINE program would run the system at 100% (P4 3.2 GH, 1 Gig RAM, running XP Pro). Just for the heck of it I ran a scan of my onboard hard drive and no malware was found. Not surprising.

Then I picked up a copy of Bitdefender. Loaded that and my interent died. For some reason Bitdefender sees any non-Microsoft wireless software (in this case Belkin) as a threat. The only way to get access to the internet was to uninstall the Bitdefender firewall. Apparently this is a common problem and Bitdefender are not responding to the market (as per the Bitdefender online forum). So I decided to uninstall Bitdefender, but before doing so I ran a scan of my hard drive. WOW...about 600 items of malware found and removed. 12 items were doubtful and I had to decide on whether they should be removed or not.

Next I installed Kaspersky. I have been running Kaspersky now for about 3 weeks with no problems. However, I did run a scan of my hard drive and about 400 malware items were found!!!! This after all those previous scans.

As I've said I am no techie. I have no personal or financial interest in the above products. I just want software that works. I would recommend that you do some research on the AV software you intend purchasing. I also recommend safe browing habits - don't visit dubious sites nor open strange emails.
 
why is MAC exempt from virus, or is it. I am in the market for another laptop and may consider a MAC if it is better or easier.
 
Macs aren't exempt from viruses, but the hackers want to have larger amounts of people available, and there are more people with PCs. If you're smart, you can have a PC without getting viruses. (and with some virus protection)
 
There are roughly 60,000 known viruses for Windows, roughly 40 for the Mac, perhaps 40 or so for Linux, and (very roughly) 5 or so known for commercial UNIX platforms.

Doesn't that contradict the title (not just a numbers game)? Well, no, and if you care (most don't) contact me and I'll be happy to go into the gory details about why Mac OSX and *NIX platforms (and Linux) are inherently more secure. Will this change with Windows 7? For the sake of the billions lost each year in productivity due to viruses and worms by companies that use Windows, I hope so.

But, just looking at the numbers, if you want 'safety' you can draw your own conclusions about what type of computer is going to be safer. Doesn't matter whether or not the numbers reflect market share.
 
22h2 said:
why is MAC exempt from virus, or is it. I am in the market for another laptop and may consider a MAC if it is better or easier.
Click to expand...

Because contrary to what their advertisement wants s to believe, they still have a minimal part of the pie. Don't get me wrong they are very good machines. If you don't know much about computers and don't mind paying a few hundreds more go for a MAC.

I use Antivira Antivir myself on my laptop, no problems. (Win XP)

Here is a website with good suggestions for free applications on the net:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/

Patrice
 
I thought I would add my thoughts on this issue. Norton is a major resource hog on just about any computer. It was great until the 2006 version came out, but from there on its kinda taken a nose dive as far as protection, and it slowed every computer we have down terribly.

I'm currently using a product from Sunbelt called Vipre
I purchase a "site" license, which means I can install/run it on as many machines as I want (we have 5 total computers at our house). And since going with it I have had ZERO infections. It is very light on system resources, and even when its conducting its scans, I can't tell its running.

As has been mentioned, you certainly don't NEED anti-virus software to run a website, but once you have a website out there, in today's "cyber world" you have basically painted a target on yourself. With a website being out there for the whole world, not using a good defense is just asking for trouble.
 
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