Which is better? When my Norton expired I activated the McAffee virus protection offered by my IP. I haven't had any attacks with either one but frequently I get alert messages of threats and when I do a scan McAffee can't find a problem. Norton never gave odd alerts. Should I stay with the free McAffee, renew Norton or is there a better solution you can give. I like free but I'll pay if it's worth it.

To be honest, neither. Both are just too bloated. AVG is free and generally good, I never had any issues with it.

It's a trap,
.......
When virus writers write a new virus, they tend to test it against all the major antivirus programs. So that means "buy a lesser-known one", right?
,,,,,
Well, when a new virus DOES come out that can infect lots of AV programs, the bigger companies have more traps and more staff to find it and work in a definition right away. So,,, that would mean it's better to run a big-company AV....


So you see the practical problem here.

I have long preferred the free version of Avira Antivir, but since the latest major version contained too much advertising for my liking (it throws up a huge ad window every time it updates anything), I switched to avast! and have been happy so far, other free AV programs are the already mentioned and often recommended Grisoft AVG, and the open source ClamAV, but that one doesn't have resident memory protection/on-access protection (I believe those two are the same thing by different names), so you'll have to run it manually every now and then as it won't check every program/file you run/open/save (as I like to set up avast! to do - doesn't take much computing power, even if it's surely a little bit slower than not doing it).

Take your pick and chose by yourself (the names are links, if you didn't see that already), those are the ones I know of, there may be others.

Well....... I had McAffee on my Compaq, and it SUCKS!
Norton isn't much better.

I'm with BOD, I suggest using Avast. It's free and quite good. There are some bad sides of it though : you have to register and request a licence after 180 days, the quarantine sucks and when it finds a virus, you have to delete the file : 90% the clean-up doesn't help. But it doesn't eat the system resources like NAV.

I've been using AVG Free for quite a while now, and it's been great for me. I tried avast! for a short time, but I didn't really care for it much myself, compared to AVG. But I'd certainly recommend it over Norton or McAffee any day.

I've been using sophos for a while now, and its great. but not free...far from it, but my Dad gets a licence from work.

I use Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition.

So far, no problems and updates are free forever.

Norton was good when it was included free on my new Compaq - but -when they wanted money for the new subscription: I gave them the flick.

It is a bugger to UNinstall!

After normal uninstall, bits of it are still retained in the system which interfere with any new AV program. After many attempts, I got rid of the mongrel: I don't want to go back to it and have to go thru all that drama again.

Currently using free AVG updated to Ver 7.5 and it seems to be doing the job.

But: who knows what evil is lurking in the depth of my hard drive???

Computer Shopper has recently done (feb 2007 issue p125) a rather controversial test that has been verified.

Avast! came last in any case, the outright winner was Kaspersky. It had the highest detection rates of any programme, it was only supersceeded by Steganos AV by price. Steganos AV is Kaspersky rebranded any way.

If you are tempted by M$ onecare you should read this: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6156733.html?tag=nl.e550

After all, we all remember how useful built in AV was in Windows 3.1

Actually, if I recall(from our family's old 486, RIP 1993-2002),the AV was built in with DOS, not Windows, but it came with a Windows version. I remember running it once. It found 27 types of malware, but it didn't delete them. It was junk.

Does anyone know what OneCare is like? Seems cheap and nice that you get licenses, covers all my machines, two which run Vista so I need a new VS anyway.

All I want is a Viruscanner, no firewall or anything else.

Isn't all that great from what I've heard, I'll have to find the link in a second.

If I remember right, the latest AVG Free Edition has Windows Vista support, by the way.

EDIT: ghostreikson already posted the link actually, I missed that when I made my post.