Norton knows about viruses before McAfee, but does strange things to my email password to be certain that I am never infected again. 
What is you choice for virus protection?
The only one I’ve really tried is Norton, and I hated it. It really slowed down loading.
I have web based email, so I figure they do the scanning. They have a button to double check with McAfee just before you open an attachment.
If there’s a scare out, I sometimes go to the McAfee site for the latest free scan, but I’d never have a resident program again.
My friend the network administrator maintains that computer virus software has a negative effect on the state of the computers under his protection. His theory is that when a new pernicious virus is launched, it’s never something the virus software can protect you from until they update it, and that having it loaded just gives you a false sense of security and encourages you to follow unsafe practices. He has some virus cleaning software on boot disks in case of emergency, but feels strongly that the best anti-virus software is inside the user’s brain. Knowledge of how viruses can and cannot be transmitted and commitment to avaiding possible routes of contamination are much more effective than installing additional resources on the PC.
I’ve found that Norton’s update service is hands-down superior to McAffee’s. Easier to use, updated more often, and IMO my computer starts up faster with Norton than when I used McAfee. Although any anti-virus software does slow down your computer’s startup time slightly.
Having a boot disk in your desk is like having a condom in your pocket and pulling it out after you get screwed. Whatever is going to go wrong has already gone wrong.
Maybe you friend is a UNIX admin or has a newtork of Macs. But for people using Windoze, AV software is pretty mandatory if you don’t want a nasty surprise. I have noticed that Norton seems to do funny things to computer operations so I use McAfee Activeshield and check for updates daily.
A lot of people have my email address. Most of them are not computer specialists, and just barely get by sending email. From personal experience, I can tell you that several of them have been ingected by viruses which sent email to everyone in their address book with their signature attached. The one I didn’t recognize was caught by McAfee before it wiped my drive.
I run a firewall as well (Zonealarm), and I am willing to trade the minor loss of system resources for the protection. An ounce of prevention, as they say.
Off Subject (but not too much) I HIGHLY recommend that you visit Steve Gibson’s homepage
and run OPTOUT and his free port probing utilities. It WILL be very interesting to most of the people on the SDMB I’ll bet. I can see a bunch of new threads already.
I use innoculateIT Pro from Network Associates. I like it because it is free and is updated just as often as the non-free ones. The only things it can’t do: scan network drives, run in DOS.
Both Norton and McAfee have horrible uninstallers. Norton screws up the system sounds while McAfee forgets to clean itself out of the Autoexec file.
I use Housecall Antivirus, which is a free online scanner that updates everytime you use it. The only bad thing about it is that you can’t customize the scans as the other 2 can.
Yes, those 15 or twenty extra bytes in the autoexec file are a major problem in the Windoze environment.
McAfee has a $20 per year, all the computers you want to check, online virus checker. Uptodate very quickly, min. software if any.
Dystopos said:
I will concure with this situation. As a network consultant, I pretty much got rid of virus programs on my client’s network because it affects computers in weird ways. I even had to take it off my servers because of the consistant crashing – the crashes stopped after I disabled the virus software.
We recently put them on all the machines because of all those funky viruses going around. I had to take them off about 10 machines (40 machine network) because of serious performance problems and other mysterious issues that disappeared after we unistalled the program.
In addition, I was having constant problems with my home office machine. The moment I disabled virus protection, my system works like a charm – except for the stupid Win98 crap that I despise.
Anyhow, for non-technical types I recommend that a virus program be installed and have those only run during times you are not on the computer (aka late night.) For tech types, I recommend searching through the tech sites on a daily basis for warnings of new viruses.
Check for an update if you own virus software at least once a month.
Oh, and I basically have told people that get those cutsy exe emails and the like, don’t send them to me. I wont open them.