I won’t bore you with the troubles I’ve seen, but I would appreciate finding a company with fine service (ideally stateside) and a first rate product.
Any and all recommendations will be appreciated.
I use a combination of Norton AntiVirus and AVG firewall. Works for me just fine. Add in AdAware, Spybot and SpySweeper for another layer of protection.
Switching to Firefox from Internet Explorer removed a lot of my problems.
Then add McAfee AV, Spybot, Adaware, and Spywareblaster from Javacool.
Spybot is essential. It found a key logging trojan on my PC, and I’m pretty careful about security.
I recommend the ZoneAlarm firewall. It’s free and quite good. They also sell a combination firewall/antivirus package, but I don’t know whether the antivirus software is any good, and of course this is not free.
Currently I’m running (non-free) BitDefender which is a comprehensive (but non-free) antivirus/firewall/popup blocker/privacy guard suite.
In the past I’ve used Avast! (antivirus) and Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall). Both are available in free and more-complex pay versions.
Panda makes a good online scanner but I’ve never used their retail products.
Norton was an excellet set of utilities but the last few years have been more bloat than anything else.
In trying to follow up on some of your recommendations, I’ds go to a website - say PC Magazine, Sygate, etc., and I get switched to another website - the same damned one each time:
http://www.realtytrac.com/pub/landing/opti_81.asp?a=b
This has been happening lately, whether I am using Firefox or Netscape 7.x
Any suggestions on what might be causing this? I checked for spyware just now with Spy Sweeper and yesterday ran a virus scan. Both were negative.
Norton’s Firewall seems to be doing the job well, but the settngs are really confusing! If you want to unblock something, you have to go through a maze of menus.
I used to have Zonealarm which was more-user-friendly.
I don’t know which one is better at blocking intruders, though.
Definately AVG Free from Grisoft, Zone Alarm Free Download, but skip the scan, they will ask for money.
CWShredder Free Download (choose the ‘standalone’ version!)
All do their own part in keeping the nasties away.
Antiochus, read through the sticky in this forum about computer questions. There is some helpful information about dealing with spyware and viruses. I don’t remember if I read it in the sticky or in a different thread, but many people recommend running more than one type of spyware in order to find everything that might be hiding on your computer.
This post in the sticky gives several suggestions with dealing with spyware problems and includes a reference to a spyware forum. The re-direct to a single website sounds like it could be due to some type of spyware (based on descriptions I’ve read elsewhere; I’m not an expert and haven’t experienced this personally). You might be able to find it using an additional product.
I use AVG as an anti-virus and Sygate personal firewall. I’ve been very happy with both. I have Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. My browser is Firefox. All of these products are free. I hardly ever see pop-ups or ads (I use the Adblock extension on Firefox) and have had no problems since I started using this combination.
GT
Yeah, you got malware–a virus scan won’t necessarily catch it because it’s not a virus. And the various spyware-removal programs tend to catch different things.
Download and run Spybot and Adaware, too. Also Javacool’s spywareblaster.
Will do. Thanks, Duck.
And thanks to all who’ve contibuted so far.