Antivirus / Firewall

[MJMoore]

What's going on these days in the world of antivirus and firewalls? I have kaspersky on my desktop, and am quite happy with it. However, I'm now using my new laptop alot, wirelessly connected to my router. It has 3 months Norton on it (I KNOW!), and once that's up, I need to think about what to get.

How are the freebies holding up, and which AVs and Firewalls are being recommended?

[Fallen Angel]

Same here - I spend most of my time on my laptop these days. Not sure about AV, though I used to use AVG Free, and that was pretty good. Caz though recommends NOD32 for AV, as does OldHonky, and I've got that on both my machines. Not free but very reasonable, and very good.

For firewall these days I'm using the ZoneAlarm free firewall, which plays much nicer than the BitDefender I was using.

[Caz]

I use Kerio v4.2 but Kerio was acquired by Sunbelt last year so I am not too sure how it stacks up now as  Sunbelt-Keriohttp://www.sunbelt-software.com/Kerio.cfm

As it is now, it works for me and once you have trained it to allow certain operations it is not at all intrusive and I have no reason to think that the new owners have meddled too much with the engine. It gives me a "perfect stealth" rating on Shields Up, which is what I look for. You can run it as a free version once the 30 day trial is over.

PS. It co-exists quite happily with NOD32, but your hardest task by far will be removing all traces of that spawn of the devil, Norton. (Sign of the cross smiley!)

[MJMoore]

Yep, I know about Norton, but it was all pre-installed. It's working fine, but it'll be interesting to see if there's any improvement when it's gone.

I did look at NOD32 last night, but it's more expensive than Kaspersky. The nice thing about the latter is that I get 30% off as a returning customer. If I do stick with them, I'm not sure whether to get the whole package, or just the AV.. and get something like zonealarm.

It gets compliacted once you get paranoid about security!! lol

[Caz]

Old Honkey trialled Kaspersky last year and found it far too intrusive, whether he just didn't have the patience to learn about it or it really is a hog I don't know. 

[Nicole]

On Caz's and a few others recommendations I purchased NOD32 late last year and have to say that I'm disappointed with it because it just hasn't found anything yet. Or is that good?

I like things like this to find the odd thing, but NoD32 never does, perhaps that's because I have clean computers?

Being silly of course, I can also recommend NOD32 at this stage but have to say the BitDefender took an age to go through its process even on Broadband on my computer.

[Fallen Angel]

On Caz's and a few others recommendations I purchased NOD32 late last year and have to say that I'm disappointed with it because it just hasn't found anything yet. Or is that good?

I like things like this to find the odd thing, but NoD32 never does, perhaps that's because I have clean computers?

If you don't download stuff from dodgy sources and use a good a good firewall, then I'd say that's a good thing. I get AVG Anti-Spyware (formerly Ewido) picking up a fair amount of cookies and adware stuff, but I've had virus problems very rarely in all the time I've been online and usually they get picked up by the email scanner of whatever AV I happened to be using at the time.

If you really want a virus though, I'm sure between us we could come up with something to send you. 

[Caz]

Want something nasty cooked up? Gio's your man then - just have to get him out of his pit though, that's the hard bit. 

[Fallen Angel]

On Caz's and a few others recommendations I purchased NOD32 late last year and have to say that I'm disappointed with it because it just hasn't found anything yet. Or is that good?

Good news Nicole!  While visiting another board tonight and clicking on a link to find out what this guy's problem was, NOD32 identified a pop-under that was harbouring a trojan type thingy or something apparently (that's a technical AV term  ), so it is doing something after all. 

[Caz]

I thought that NOD had let something through yesterday when I had freezes and BODs galore, but several disk cleans, Windows repair (with my genuine advantage XP disk  ) and defrags (2 drives) later it appeared that Windoze had gone bad. Then ran NOD in depth scan which found nothing. ( I also thumped the case and replaced a missing screw.  )

M$ strikes again. 

[Giomanach]

Want something nasty cooked up? Gio's your man then - just have to get him out of his pit though, that's the hard bit. 

What would you like?  Permanent PC damage? Unusable Operating System? Hardware damage?

All products come with free headache and all are without Guarantee and Warranty.

Call 0-888-SUC-KER for more info

(sounds just like Microcrap eh? :P)

[Nicole]

Fallen Angel, I downloaded and installed Zone Alarm Free Firewall after reading this thread on the weekend and initially everything was fine. But over the past few days some websites have been getting progressively slower to load, not to load really, but longer to recognise the address, once they're on the site they download just as sites should on Broadband.

Did you notice this? If so, did you deal with it? If so how?

I haven't changed any of the default settings.

[Fallen Angel]

That wouldn't be down to a firewall I don't think. A firewall either lets apps through or not.

I was having problems with sites loading slow or not at all, but that was down to the dimwits at my local telephone exchange and my now ex-ISP who kept telling me that contention was all in my mind.

Things have improved a fair bit now, but I do seem to have problems still in the evenings with some sites taking ages to load. I think that's due to general internet congestion though more than anything else, because it's fine during the day.