What is the best anti virus out there?

**samtech** · April 10th, 2009, 06:37 AM

What is the best anti virus out there?
mcafee just expired and i need to know which i should buy.

**Niclo Iste** · April 10th, 2009, 07:47 AM

SLGrieb would be your best input. My testing results I had to do for a local firm showed that NOD32 was the most efficient and well rounded product. McAfee ranked fairly low in our testing. Norton is a semi-decent system but I've seen it ignore many infections just not as many ad McAfee would.

If you're interested in it NOD32 can be found at www.eset.com.

**Draggar** · April 10th, 2009, 08:51 AM

AVG is free and very good.

**Platypus** · April 10th, 2009, 09:15 AM

Eset agrees with Niclo:

http://www.eset.com/products/compare...ompetition.php

**slgrieb** · April 10th, 2009, 06:26 PM

Originally Posted by Platypus

Eset agrees with Niclo:

http://www.eset.com/products/compare...ompetition.php

Yeah, me too. The new v 4.0 is noticeably faster than than v. 3, and it takes a big improvement in speed to be perceptible to a user. It also offers SmartScan and full scan options.

Symantec's Norton AV is extremely effective, but I have several gripes with Symantec. NAV 2009 is pretty quick, but Norton 360 2009 is just a pig. It's slow and duplicates too many functions already found in most current browsers, email software and Windows itself. Also, Norton seems to have more than it's fair share of installation and uninstallation glitches. About 2 weeks ago, one of the updates for NAV 2009 also rendered IE7 unable to connect on 5 computers owned by 2 different customers. Why? No idea. Just used Symantec's Norton Removal Tool to clean out NAV, and installed NOD32.

If you go the free route, right now I'd use Avira, Avast!, or AVG in that order.
I'd also install and run regular scans with Spybot (DON'T use System Protection/Tea Time) and Malwarebytes Antimalware.