My Norton Internet Security subscription is up in a couple of days. Renewal for a year is $30. I’m looking around to see if there is a good FREE virus program out there before I do. In addition to detecting viruses, it has a firewall, “intrusion detection,” and ad blocking.
Any suggestions? Muchas gracias and happy Cesar Chavez Day!
I doubt there is anything free. I’d use F-Secure if it wasn’t for the high price, so i use Norton (at home and at work).
One thing you can do is buy on eBay. There are always some NAV copies being sold there. I assume that’s from people who buy computers with the software pre-loaded and then blow away the software anyway (e.g. to install Linux). Beware: the last time i bought NAV on eBay, i got a license key that didn’t work (Norton complained that there were already too many copies using that key). But i emailed the seller and he promptly sent me a new license key (which worked). I did get the official Norton CD and packaging.
www.grisoft.com/ has AVG anti virus which is recommended here a lot.
I was given that for free once when I had my computer repaired, it’s probably not altogether free but could be worth looking at.
McAfee came with my machine and it has never asked for money while still updating and working well.
I think McAfee changed recently. I had McAfee at home. It worked for 3 years without asking for money, but about 2 months ago it “told” me it wasn’t going to update itself anymore unless i bought a subscription. Since i had been having sporadic problems with it anyway, i bought Norton instead.
Yes the AVG (aka Grisoft) is free. It’s good too. I hear it was developed for the government, with government money, and the stipulation was that the company had to offer a version for free to the public. AVG also has a pay version, but I don’t think it’s any more powerful it’s just that you get support with it. You don’t get any support with the free version, but there is a message board where you can get help with most problems. And you have to update it manually, rather then having automatic updates. Which isn’t a big deal.
I used this one for several years until AOL started offering McAfee free:
The personal (as opposed to busimess or commercial)version is completely free, as are virus definition upgrades
I’ve been using AVG for 2-3 years now, and it’s great. They have good FAQs and all, so I’ve never needed support. It auto-updates on a very regular basis (I think about every 2-3 days there is a new update), and it’s caused no systems problems on two different computers.
Eric
I’ve seen the AVG site before when I did a google search, but didn’t know if it was any good. I’ll check them out and AntiVir, too.
Thanks, everybody, for your suggestions.
In a former life I used to be a computer systems analyst. The best system I found is designed by Zone Alarm, having tried all the major concerns over the years. They have a free basic firewall on the site which I’m sure would suit, it is also compatible with AVG virus.
D
A coworker just started using AVG. He really likes it. Apparently it has a tiny footprint, i.e. it doesn’t eat your system resources or take up too much hard drive space.
I personally detest McAfee. On a fresh Windows XP Home install on a new hard drive there were 19 active processes after the first boot.
I installed McAfee and even if I shut off all their system tray garbage I still had 34. The firewall messed up and blocked all internet traffic.
Also PCcillian has become a system hog as well. It used to be nice and small like AVG but now it has a bunch of “integrated features”.
Crap.