I have used just about every antivirus suit you could possibly imagine over the years. My very first antivirus suit was norton and yes I switched many years ago to other alternatives. My latest antivirus was nod32 and it did great but I recently switched back to norton after all the great reviews and they have really made a 360 turn altogether.
To be honest I'm pleased to say it's currently the quickest, safest and best antivirus software I have used to date and i never thought i would be the one to say this in regards to norton but facts don't lie. They even went so much out of there way to implement cpu usage statistics and some other usefull stuff into the antivirus itself so you can see for yourself it uses nearly 0% cpu usage/resources. It's great!
Edit: I forgot to mention they even have a Gamers Edition available which is really great aswell!
Whether these things interfere with your computing... thats my benchmark. Also, how thoroughly the thing embeds itself into your OS... somewhat like a malicious virus or trojan (!)... thats another.
if ur willing to get a paid full version i have been using zonealarm suite comes with most everything u need all in one and i also use threatfire and spyblaster with it. i have had no troubles at all for yrs. Norton still is way off my list i have used it and hate it
Every time I've tested zonealarm, it has caused application conflicts. I have no clue how you've gotten away with using it for YEARS without issues... I'm not ruling it out permanently though as you seem to have done with norton, I don't do that with software.
oh, and WarlokLord. I don't care if my security suite becomes one with my OS as long as I can remove it properly, be it with third party software or whatelse...
I had to get rid of it because it kept on crashing fullscreen applications (namely GC2, but others as well) because the VSmon service kept crashing, restarting, and stealing focus, without even actually showing anything.
So every 5 minutes I'd be alt-tabbed to the desktop, and when I'd try to go back into my game, it would crash.
So then I tried Outpost.
Funny story, that.
Turns out Outpost is incompatible with AVG.
I learn this after installing Outpost alongside an already present AVG installation (no incompatibility warning), rebooting as it asks, and receiving a BSOD on bootup.
So I try safe mode.
And I get a BSOD booting into safe mode.
So now, I'm using Comodo, and although it's quirkier than I'd like, it does the job.
Well, not everything is compatible with everything else. The deeper the anti-virus embeds itself, the less options you have to temporarily suspend its operations when you encounter a software conflict. There is a parallel here with DRM schemes.
Actually the parallell would be with the malware. It's kind of obvious that anti-malware need to run on the same level of the OS that the malware itself does.
I don't see how it's similar to DRM at all... DRM is not harmful, there's NO evidence that any of the commonly used DRM apps do any kind of damage, just a bunch of loose accusations and people nodding without having a clue...
I think Avast is the best. And I have used the free and the pro versions. Not much difference in my eyes.
I have been a paid AVG user for quite a while, did a little research, and Norton Internet Security has done a re-write of the program and its performance, i had my doubts, with Norton and all, well i'll tell you i installed it a week ago and this thing isjust great, very low resources, the scans are really fast, i never realized how big of a resource hog AVG was, just my two cents
I am now wondering if Trend Micro and Symantec have been working on solutions to the problem that resulted in my "throughing the Trend AV suite back in their face", although I suspect I wasn't the only one complaining.
My son also had the Trend Micro suite on his computer and his subscription just ran out. I told him about the problems I had and why I had switched back to Norton, and we were going to go through the complete removal process for the TM suite. But the first step (the desktop "uninstall program" function) completely removed TM, including all of TMs folders and programs, making the second step undoable. We had earlier noticed in the online description of the Norton suite that it checks for and removes conflicting hooks into the OS, so we went ahead and bought, downloaded, and installed NIS2009. So far it seems to be working fine; no obvious performance degredation, no glitches, etc. (But it has only been a few days.)
It has been 5 months since I had my todo with TM, and my son has been getting the TM upgrades automatically. I suspect that may be where he got the code upgrade for the uninstall of TM's suite.
AVG Free, it's designed for corporate customers, then given away free to private users, this makes it the best anti-virus you can get because it's designed by a developer team with a actual budget, and giving it away for free means more users, the more users it has, the more viruses they can catch early on. I've been using AVG for four years and never had a virus, for about three of those I spent 90% of my time online downloading torrent files, I've had AVG flag a dozen of so files for me as I was opening them, stopping me from ruining my system. My dad uses, against my reccomendation, McAffee, the only reason he'll get a new computer is because he's too lazy to fix his when it dies, he just bought his fourth laptop in three years.
You can find it at free.grisoft.com I would also suggest pairing it with SpyBot and running the TeaTimer, it will notify you of any attempts to access you registry and prompt you to allow or deny it.
LOL. Just tried to install/run it (it does require a download) and the installer immediately crashed IE7.
Not true. StarForce in various forms has slain a number of CD drives, or more commonly degraded the performance of them. DRM that is that perilous *is* malware... the intent is moot versus such effects.
And microwave ovens heat things from the inside out, and cows fly...
Show me a single, documented case where StarForce has been proven to cause hardware failure... You won't find it, because there is none. Hardware break down for a huge lot of reasons, StarForce is not one of them.
Not failure...but slowdowns and a very real reluctance to return function of the drive to the OS...or to external button-press.
Who rates as 'documented'?
Shall I do?
Good old GTR from Simbin.....