ive been using NOD32, heard a few people recommend it but, i think a anti virus is a anti virus. but if you look into firewalls and just get one and something comes up and you dont know wtf port somethings trying to connet to and you let it go your screwing yourself. Just because you have no idea what port that is. If you dont know what ports are what I dont think a firewalls helping you that much.
my .02
I worked at a small place in South Park that was 100% Nod32, they loved it. It takes a bit to get used to because the interface is pretty goofy, but it seems to work pretty well on my system. I use this in addition to ZoneAlarm. For a free firewall it seems to be working alright. I don’t get any random popups and all that, so it’s fine with me.
In order of preference of the ones I’ve tried…
AVG Free Anti-Virus
Trend PC-Cillin
MacAfee
Norton
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Norton did nothing but cause problems. They install xty-billion Windows Services and pretty it much stops everything from happening without a nagging dialog box unless you now how to configure it.
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MacAfee is pretty good, but it pukes when updating sometimes and when you go to start the program…it prompts you for Windows Installer JIT repair mode. If you don’t have the MSI file to feed it, good luck trying to get the thing to run, repair, or uninstall.
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PC-Cillin is made and written by poeple outside of the United States, so the “All your base are belong to us” syndrome happens in their readme files and sometimes in the program. More of an annoyance for a English language stickler, but the thing worked and didn’t nag the hell out of me.
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AVG is pretty good and it’s free as all get out.
omg, banks are horrible???
http://www.rand.org/about/history/Rand.IT.Summer04.pdf
pg 58. They very much invented the internet.
This is turning off topic. I’m done.
ok, so I’m not done: To the original poster, I tend to like the Symantec AV products, just make sure you don’t install the entire Symante suite of crap. The AV is decent enough and the system footprint is only like 5Mb of memory useage. I have 10x the ammount of memory being used by outlook and firefox. AVG seems pretty popular now too, and it’s free, so you might want to give that a shot, as others have said.
i’ve used symantec corporate client on all machines i’ve built or worked on… not one person had a problem… it has certified updates and is a solid reliable company… there is no reason to shy away from them in my opinion.
- this thread isn’t about firewalls, but starboy is right… if you allow anything through you’re creating the hole that renders your firewall useless… i use fireboxes and by default they block all inbound and outbound traffic… this is the best out of the box firewall because it requires you to actively monitor and allow connections, so you know whats coming in or out.
My internet is more secure than yours!
We use server distributed Symantec corporate at work…seems to be effective, but for whatever reason the server hierchy stops communicating sometimes, so we’ll get an entire department with out of date virus defs. We can generally fix it by updating the PCs through the master console, but sometimes a few are stubborn and our helpdesk has to go in and actually restart the A/V service on the PC and then update manually. I don’t understand why this happens (quite honestly I’m not very knowledgeable with this system).
Symantec is a system hog when updating…we force our workstations to check for updates either nightly or whenever the PC is turned back on. This can be an annoyance to our users but hey…all in the name of security.
At home I run AVG free, and have no complaints at all.
that will get u a :ban:
x2!
A ‘firewalled’ ip address and userID is most ‘secure’ :bigok:
i’ve heard and seen worse on here
dont mess with me!