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Pandella

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Post: 79500953_1 created on Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:39:07 +0000
Posted: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:39:07 +0000

My new computer comes next week and right now, because it is Dell, it just has the preinstalled
McAfee security software on it. I personally do not like McAfee and I think it does not do a good
job of protecting my computer, even if I am smart about what I do/click (my mother uses my
computer as well, and she on the other hand, is not).

Right now I am looking at the Norton total security or Bitdefender 2012..but I was wondering if
anyone had any recommendations on what is a good security protection suite that is efficient
and does not bog down a computer.

GrimFusion

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Post: 79500953_2 created on Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:52:34 +0000
Posted: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:52:34 +0000

Bit Defender or Kaspersky.
Avast! and GData aren't bad, either.

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Post: 79500953_3 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 01:42:53 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 01:42:53 +0000

Free, Subscription, or One time charge only protections?

Pandella

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Post: 79500953_4 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 01:46:56 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 01:46:56 +0000

Tapil

Free, Subscription, or One time charge only protections?

Recommendations on both are fine

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Post: 79500953_5 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 01:57:49 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 01:57:49 +0000

AVG is a good freebie. I don't know what the rest of my PC family uses for protection, I'll ask around and let you know.

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Post: 79500953_6 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 02:18:05 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 02:18:05 +0000

I use Avast

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Post: 79500953_7 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 02:59:07 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 02:59:07 +0000

Pandella

Don't get Norton or McAfee.
Microsoft Security Essentials is a great system that has live protection.
Spybot Search & Destroy is a RAM whore, but the Protection module of it is very useful. Don't have it running at all times, but run it periodically for the protection service (that will block access to known virus websites).
If you are insistent on paying for anti-virus, I would recommend Malwarebytes. It's upgraded/paid version has live protection that blocks entire virus servers. Very useful. A few false positives, but amazing service nonetheless. Very effective.

Besides those three, to Hell with any other anti-virus. The rest are mostly bloatware or don't achieve anything that these three don't already.

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Post: 79500953_8 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 05:09:22 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 05:09:22 +0000

MalwareBytes and Microsoft Security Essentials is all you really need.

Both are free.

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Post: 79500953_9 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 06:27:42 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 06:27:42 +0000

AVAST is best with Malwarebytes... smile

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Post: 79500953_10 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 06:32:07 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 06:32:07 +0000

I've worked a lot of tech support for my university and me and most of the people I work with use Microsoft Security Essentials and MalwareBytes on our personal computers.
The university requires we install McAfee on every computer and it doesn't seem to really help. Professors still somehow get their computers choked with viruses.

I don't know why the school still uses McAfee after that day last year when McAfee's update erroneously marked a Windows system file as a virus and every computer on campus became unusable and completely unable to access the school's network. rolleyes

Saruwatari Kooji

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Post: 79500953_11 created on Wed, 02 May 2012 10:12:48 +0000
Posted: Wed, 02 May 2012 10:12:48 +0000

CrashMD

Many schools and larger entities get contracts and very nice discounts with McAfee, often times too good to resist. It's not an entirely bad piece of software, but they do seem to have started lagging behind in recent times...

I would personally recommend Microsoft Security Essentials for personal use. It's very lightweight as far as system resources go so it won't bog down your machine. It tends to stay very quiet...most of the time you may even forget it's there. It will download and install it's updates automatically without any input needed from the user. When you install it, it will have you set up a day and time of the week for it to do a regular scan that it will do automatically as long as the computer is on...again, this is all in the background and it should be set to only use what resources are currently in use by any other active programs...so yet again it does a really good job at not bogging down your system even when doing a task that could easily drag your system to a crawl. I've been using it on my machine for about 2 years now and I've only seen maybe 6 notifications from MSE in that whole time.

There are other good choices out there as well. Avast is a decent choice but lately it seems to be taking up far more resources than I think is necessary. Avira does an alright job, but it is always popping up notifications that get rather annoying. While I don't personally recommend AVG, it's not a terrible option.