My Norton 360 sub is officially dead.

[ispano]

As far as what AV I use, I don't have one.

As far as what AV I install on customer's PC's I normally put AVG if the machine is capable or try to sell them the payed version as I'm an AVG partner, if there machine is old and really slow I normally go with nod32 just because it is extremely light weight.

But as I said before, who use's the machine? and if it's only you, maybe you should ask yourself why do I get virus's so much that warrant's a real-time protector

This pretty much sums it up. I use Avira, once I get around to installing it that is. I haven't had a virus, piece of malware, you name it, in at LEAST 10 years. And of those 10 years, I've had Avira installed for less than a year total. And never active, I would only scan periodically.

[Deleted]

I don't use any AV software.

What bugs me is how horribly obtrusive they are. Flashy, hyped up warnings about every minor thing. Horrible tracking cookie, and oh no, the firewall has blocked a connection. Of course, most AV software now forces monthly reports upon you, desperately craving for your attention and trying to convince you of what a absolutely and completely necessary piece of software they are.

The reason why it bugs me is that if it shows the warning, it detected the threat anyway, and it's no longer a threat - hence no need for a warning. If it doesn't detect a threat, you won't see a warning to start with, and you'll get the malware without even knowing.

If I install AV software on people's PCs, I usually give them Kaspersky, as they end up with the highest detection rates in various magazines (heise c't, here) and can relatively quickly be configured to just shut up and do its job.

Apart from that, Firefox is doing quite well here, I'm not just clicking every file I get prompted to download, and Windows (and the NAT'ing routers present for most people) do a fine job as firewalls - quiet and efficiently, like it should be.

[Floboduck]

Get MSE.

Altough at the moment i am using Avast on one of my laptops (it's not a bad anti-virus)

I currently work in a company which loves Symantec, i spend my entire day working around its over zealous firewall in order to do my job.

I can't even FTP onto on of our web servers without getting spammed with security warnings.

Symantec products, Mcafee are bad don't use them - true story bro!

[gooseuk]

I use a few free basic things and i have 4 pcs in the house that never get any issues what so eva. Use spybot search and destroy. Malewarebytes run the scan every now and again. Avg free not the best but works to a point.

Thats pretty much it. Never really get any issues what so eva not for years infact ( Apart from one on my new build around febuary). Windows update always uptodate use firefox nothing more to say really.

I often wonder why norton 360 is 59.99 very expensive per year any way.

[Noisze]

MSSE is all you really need and even it is overkill.

Honestly, you can protect your pc better than any antimalware solution simply by educating yourself on how malware works.

I find a lot of this software just fills the holes in your knowledge, without shedding any insight on how you can avoid threats without relying on that next big "ALERT: YOU GOT SOMETHING NASTY" and putting all your trust in terms like "Quarantine & Disinfect".

It's that big brother that holds your hand through weeks, months... perhaps even years of your own sheer ignorance.

It teaches you nothing you don't already know and offers little in the way of education, it just cons you into lending it your trust and giving it your money.

:-P

[vesseblah]

Honestly, you can protect your pc better than any antimalware solution simply by educating yourself on how malware works.

It's that big brother that holds your hand through weeks, months... perhaps even years of your own sheer ignorance.

Speaking of sheer ignorance, there's nothing you can do against zero-day vulnerabilities in widespread file formats by educating yourself. Only sure way to be safe is disconnecting your computer from the internet completely. Commercial AV products with advanced heuristic scanners are the next best thing after being disconnected from the internet against zero-day vulnerabilities.

[Noisze]

There are intelligent approaches to this actually.

While neither of these are 100%, you can still effectively minimize your chances of infection by whitelisting & using HIPS.

Not to mention, you can browse the web EXCLUSIVELY from a sandbox and protect yourself from any zero-days that try to install themselves from a browser.

[vesseblah]

There are intelligent approaches to this actually.

While neither of these are 100%, you can still effectively minimize your chances of infection by whitelisting & using HIPS.

Not to mention, you can browse the web EXCLUSIVELY from a sandbox and protect yourself from any zero-days that try to install themselves from a browser.

Whitelisting don't protect from stuff like XSS exploits or DNS cache poisoning. Sandboxing would work if you're running a browser inside virtual machine, but it will not protect you from things like keyloggers infecting the sandbox (unless you're really paranoid and wipe the sandbox clean between every single site visit), neither it will protect you from trojans infecting programs downloaded from legit sources or trojans sticking to programs inside the sandbox before you move those outside for installation. Having good realtime heuristic scanner in addition to safe browsing habits is 10x more secure than relying on just the AV program or just user's expertise.

[Asera]

Been using NOD32 for about 5 years now.

[Deleted]

Avast, without a doubt. I've tried so many and I like this one the most.
In terms of testing I once opened several sites that were in the "Blizzard has realised you're trying to sell your account!!" emails and a lot of them gave me a lovely red box saying threat detected and blocked while the other ones were just lame copies trying to enter your username & password.

I've also never had a false positive unlike AVG giving me loads in the few months that I tried it.

[Dassen]

I have yet to use an antivirus as effective as Avast.
I can surf freely with it, it scans all incoming traffic and if it detects anything harmful it aborts loading the site.
Not just websites though, it scans all incoming traffic and blocks everything harmful.

[DeltrusDisc]

As far as what AV I use, I don't have one.

As far as what AV I install on customer's PC's I normally put AVG if the machine is capable or try to sell them the payed version as I'm an AVG partner, if there machine is old and really slow I normally go with nod32 just because it is extremely light weight.

But as I said before, who use's the machine? and if it's only you, maybe you should ask yourself why do I get virus's so much that warrant's a real-time protector

Well, that's the thing, I have not gotten any viruses, so I more or less felt that it was time to stop paying for something I don't need.

[Erous]

I know there are a lot of posts mentioning AVAST, so I just want to give my 2 cents. AVAST was great when I tried it and I was going along with no issue. One day I decided to check the interface to run some manual updates, only to find that the AV is disabled! An update had failed a day or so ago, and because I had gaming mode on, I didn't even know it was disabled.

Good AV program, but very silent when it runs. Had to switch back to AVG.

[soapy]

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/latest_comparative/index

AVG, while not the best, is one of the better ones. I like it in conjunction with MSSE, and malware bytes to do regular scans.

[Obrysii]

Uninstall Norton ASAP. It's a resource hog and is just terrible. MBAM, Avast, and Avira are all good, and much much lighter on resources.

[Darkdruidelf]

Norton is awful. Its one of the worst things ever made. How it makes money astonishes me.

MSE is what I use and is better than 90% of the paid ones. NOD32 is the exception. If you are torrenting a lot, NOD32 is amazing and fantasticly easy to work with.

[soapy]

Someone already posted about Avira free... I just installed it. It's small, fast, effective.

[aztr0]

I've used AVG for a long time, but one day after an update the program kept saying I got threats from files. Instead of listening to AVG and quarantine or delete file I looked up what these so called threats were. So I quarantined it and I scanned the system full. Came up with more "threats." I said, this can't be right, I've been using this program for so long, I am very anal about my system security. No way something got through with my Firefox Noscript, adblock and several other scanning software. So I uninstalled AVG, and installed Avast. I did all the updates etc with Avast, when through a full scan and funny how nothing came up. So to be more careful I downloaded Malwarebyte's Anti Malware - full scanned after updates and again nothing came up that AVG was showing. I concluded AVG was busted because of the definition update and I haven't gone back to AVG since. Avast does its job, leaves me alone, can't complain about it.

[Ethermal]

Comodo is probably the best i've had so far

[Contion_BB]

NEVER EVER get anything that Microsoft Makes...

It is a proven fact that most viruses and trojans and worms are designed SPECIFICALLY for Microsoft products... Why? cause they are out there saying how UNHACKABLE, UNINFECTABLE, UNBACKDOORABLE (I love making up words) that their system is... and you will most likely be infected by tons of stuff and never Know about it.

My suggestions would be....

Avast Anti-Virus
Malware Bytes

and the occasional

Spybot Search & Destroy

NEVER EVER USE A PAID ANTIVIRUS program... THEY ARE the targeted software because of stupidly advertising their security is 100% infallible