Alternative to Norton 360?

[Deleted1744345User]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I now have Microsoft Security Essentials installed. It took forever to update because my modem kept disconnecting from the internet. I'll see how it works, but no matter what, I'm not dealing with Norton again.

[TheReverendTholomewPlague]

For instance an anti-spam feature which gives you a big flashy warning if you havn't trained it on e-mails, and gives you constant warnings when it is disabled.

 

Huh? I've never had this. All you have to do is wait for the pop up to appear and then (from the drop down menu) tell it to disable this notofication.

[N3C14R]

I use McAfee Antivirus Plus. Seems decent, no annoying messages and such, the only thing I dislike about it is that it prevented some of my firefox plugins from working. :/

I guess you didn't notice the fact that it can't detect anything other than false positives. Its heuristics are a joke, its definitions are often months behind. The company only exists at this point because they have bundle contracts with computer manufacturers and can get the occasional uninformed consumer. Norton is almost just as bad. A company which exists less for their product than the name of their product.

 

In general, any product pushed by an ISP or as bundled software tends to be utter crap. There are few exceptions.

 

I would recommend Kaspersky, except that their internet security 2011 package seems to have a small memory leak somewhere that can result in the program taking up 1gb+ of memory if you leave your computer running for a few days. Only a handful of customers seem to experience it, but they don't particularly seem inclined to solve it. This is just the latest step in the trend of Kaspersky becoming more and more like Norton, lack of quality or support for their product, lack of timely updates, dependency on obtrusive scans and constant popups. For instance an anti-spam feature which gives you a big flashy warning if you havn't trained it on e-mails, and gives you constant warnings when it is disabled. Not a big deal for those of us who need/want a program deciding what is and is not spam for them, but fairly annoying otherwise.

 

My best recommendation at this point would actually be AVG and Spybot, maybe with Malwarebytes as a safety net. AVG seems the most relaible out of all out there, and is free, so you don't have to pay a subscription fee unless you really like the program and want some extra features. Spybot has rather consistently always been good for finding stuff other softwares miss and can prevent many threats from even taking hold.

 

But if you need some of the firewall stuff from Norton and Kaspersky, Comodo is a good alternative to AVG, provided you can sit down and spend the time getting it setup and working.

Kapersky, fine but AVG and Norton? Seriously? The 2 most resource hogging sercurity/antivirus programs and most new malware generally tend to avoid detection from. :/

[Vagrant0]

Kapersky, fine but AVG and Norton? Seriously? The 2 most resource hogging sercurity/antivirus programs and most new malware generally tend to avoid detection from. :/

I agreed, Norton was crap. But AVG is both free and still reliable.

 

ALL reasonably good antivirus programs that don't only run on demand (Avast only scans when you tell it to) take up resources, this cannot be helped since they need to scan both files and processes are they are happening. Those that don't usually have laughable heuristics or only work off their list of identified threats. The difference between Norton and AVG is that Norton sucks up resources to do non-essential processing, and their heuristics haven't changed much in 4-5 years. AVG on the otherhand changes its heuristics more and more every few months in response to all those attempts to avoid detection.

 

ALL common antiviruses out there have viruses which are designed to avoid detection. This is what makes McAfee and Norton so totally useless. Many virus makers use methods which these scanners miss simply because many businesses, families, and schools use these programs from one of the dozens of business deals that are out there. Kaspersky too has seen this sort of thing increase over the last 4 years. The more popular an Antivirus, the more people will try to make their viruses avoid detection from that program. The way to combat this is through frequent updates to their list of identified threats and minor changes to the heuristics. Viruses of any kind typically aren't found until someone knows that they have a virus and manages to detect it, meaning that if you are among the first hundred or so people to be attacked by something new, chances are that no virus scanner will pick it up unless it does something that can be found from a heuristic scan.

 

Regardless, no antivirus will find everything. This is why you use more than one program... usually 2 antiviruses (one background, one on demand) and have a scanner specifically for malware. Think of any virus scanner as a filter, what one doesn't trap, another one might. A multi-layered defense works best because those viruses which are designed to avoid detection in one will usually be detected by another (unless they use the same or similar heuristic algorithm). As with all filters, you can't filter out 100% of everything without just making your computer read only, but you can aim for that 90% mark to get protection from almost everything out there.