• The Previous Posting

  « Can’t uninstall Java 1.6.0.11, Unable to locate jre1.6.0_11-c-l.msi

• The Next Posting

  I can’t Find My Firefox Bookmarks After a Recovery »

What’s a good Anti-Virus to use?

We wrote this post in response to a com­ment on another post. We most often rec­om­mend Avast, AVG, and Zone Alarm. Our choices are based on prod­ucts that are effi­cient in pre­vent­ing virus infec­tions, semi trans­par­ent, unob­tru­sive, and user friendly. And FYI. if you see the image below when copy­ing files, you may have a virus.

Avast free and Avast Pro:

Avast pro­vides a free Anti-Virus, how­ever we found it to be a lit­tle intru­sive and irri­tat­ing. Avast seems to pester its free users with con­stant pops and related to their paid product.

Their paid prod­uct how­ever is a dream to use. The only time Avast Pro will ever pester you or slow your flow of work and surf­ing, is if you encounter a mali­cious script from a web­page, down­load mali­cious soft­ware, a viruses, or any other prob­lem you may have.

AVG free and Paid:

AVG pro­vides an amaz­ing free Anti-Virus. Its fre­quent scans and lack of Spy­ware pro­tec­tion are the only com­plaint here.

AVG’s paid prod­uct is top notch. Its fire­wall can be intru­sive at times, mak­ing file shar­ing over a net­work dif­fi­cult. But for the most part it has one of the small­est mem­ory foot­prints, and pro­vides amaz­ing protection.

Zonealarm free and Secu­rity Suite:

Zonealarm free only pro­vides a fire­wall. But the fire­wall is very pow­er­ful and pro­vides full con­trol over net­work con­nec­tions and pro­gram con­trol. It is how­ever a prod­uct that has a learn­ing curve. It can be very dif­fi­cult to use as a casual user, and can even hin­der your com­puter if not setup properly.

Zonealarms paid prod­uct…. Let’s just say “We love Zonealarm”. It can be dif­fi­cult to use, some­times a resource hog, but it pro­vides pro­tec­tion like noth­ing else. Its fire­wall lets almost noth­ing through. Its virus def­i­n­i­tions are always the most fre­quently updated, and its user inter­face is one of the most straight­for­ward and clean. If you have a fairly decent knowl­edge of com­put­ers, and some com­mon sense, this is def­i­nitely a good anti-virus to look into.

As of prod­ucts we don’t rec­om­mend to our clients, here’s a list.

Nor­ton. A pow­er­ful anti-virus, but bad news if you want a decent run­ning com­puter. Their Anti-virus is one of the most pow­er­ful, and it will remove most any virus. But it has a huge mem­ory foot­print and has been known to use the major­ity of your pro­cess­ing power. We’ve also writ­ten a few hor­ror sto­ries of botched unin­stalls of their product.

McAfee. You couldn’t believe how many infected com­put­ers we see that have MacAfee installed. More often than not it’s the free ver­sion pro­vided by Com­cast. But as far as we know, there’s no dif­fer­ence between that prod­uct and their paid versions.

Trend Micro. We really don’t have much to say about this prod­ucts. Its not great on resources, and we’ve seen it run­ning on more than one infected computer.

Did we miss any prod­ucts? Or have we for­got­ten any good ones? Let us know.