PC Matic

David Stifle

David Stifle

Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
10,188
I see quite a few commercials for PC Matic anti-virus protection. Anyone use this and if so, what's your experience with them?
 
Personally, never been happy with any virus protection, even less so now that they've virtually eliminated any outside control by (gasp!) the owner of the computer.

If you want safety, try a virtual machine, such as one offered for free by sandboxie.
Browse all you want, work all you want, viruses/adware/malware all gets flushed when you are done working.

And no antivirus software interfering with your machine!
 
I used to do IT (I now do software development), PC Matic has a bad reputation. A PC Matic scan will give you a lot of false hits to make you download their software. Do a google search. They have more complaints compared to other free antivirus programs. I'd go with Avast, AVG, Panda, or Avira. They tend to be at the top of rankings from a number of sources: PC World, PC Mag, CNET, etc.
 
I have a paid subscription to Trendmicro. I used to go with those free antiviruses, but everyone of them have holes big enough to drive a truck through. After enough crashes and reformatting I realized that my computer is worth far more than any protection offered for free.
 
I've found that smart browsing and common sense goes a long way on a computer. Having an anti virus is a good thing, but being a smart/cautious user is more important.
 
I used to use various anti virus software, but they'd work well for a few years and then go bad usually because of some major product revision.

Now I just use the Microsoft Security Essentials that you download for free. Not heavy duty but it's been consistent.
 
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If this is for your home machine which runs Windows, I would just use Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender. From my experience, the other vendors like to add things you don't need, like link scanning every web site. I would go to a search engine to find something and the page would spin for 5 minutes while they tried to scan all the results. A lot of the 3rd party systems have bad reputations these days, and I don't see the corporate customers I support using them.

One of my previous employers (a long time ago in computer years) was using a commercial AV and we got hit with one of the major viruses. Had to scan our PCs every day for Months. We changed AV vendors after that, but still were bitten with another virus. For better or worse, Microsoft integrating an anti-virus with Windows has killed the 3rd party anti-virus market. They tried integrating AV a long time ago, but the other vendors got the government on them to back down. Reputation wise, Microsoft had no choice. The news reports about people getting hit with viruses and malware was looking bad for them, even though the 3rd party AV missed it.
 
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