Norton Antivirus substitute

Free and paid:

formatting link
formatting link
formatting link
formatting link
formatting link
prefer Grisoft Free AVG.

Here's a shopping list:

formatting link
formatting link
formatting link

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
Loading thread data ...

Is there any anti virus service other than Norton as a substitute. They do not have enough people working to be able to get a renewal.

BILL P.

Reply to
William. Boyd

Jeff's list is good. But I used to swear by eTrust EZ Antivirus. It's still very good, but they're now going for the "kitchen sink" approach a la Norton and McAfee (not a good thing in my opinion). Now the granddaddy of AVs for me is Kaspersky. This is only a sample of one, but a few days ago I removed viruses from a heavily infected machine using AVG and got the first wave, then I ran eTrust and got a few more, then I ran Trend Housecall and got maybe 2 more. Then I ran Kaspersky, which took about 4-5 hours to scan, and it found 26 more infected files. If that machine ain't clean now it's not going to get clean.

Reply to
Rôgêr

i use nod32 ... fast and a killer! :-) ...

formatting link
....nfi but a san diego company ...

steve

Reply to
pshaw

AVG so much better then norton. Norton can really mess with you computer and bog it down with all the bs stuff it installs and you can never remove.

formatting link

Reply to
gekco

Add to that (to my surprise)

formatting link
and their eTrust EZ Antivirus (find via Security link, then Home Store). Works on Win2k Servers, costs nothing (for the first year?).

[shopping list snipped]
Reply to
Colum Mylod

The trick with Norton is to not install anything but the Norton antivirus app. All their other stuff ties up your machine like a minimum wage employee with 15 maxed credit cards.

--Ray B

Reply to
Ray Bacon

Thats why it makes sense not to bother with anything made by Symantec in the first place. I can imagine Peter Norton (whose name they bought) and was once known for producing excellent, compact utilities is not a happy guy having his name on such incredible bloatware.

Reply to
George

I kinda like McAfee ASAP, it's a very simple app that just does virus scanning (no POP interceptor, no firewall, no singing, no dancing). Unfortunately you have to buy a minimum of two licenses, but it lets you visit a WWWesite to check the update status, which works really well for me to keep track of my client's machines remotely. The price is right too, ~$50/2 years per seat.

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

I just installed AVG and I have to say I'm favorably impressed so far. This thread coincided with me trying to figure out why this 2 ghz laptop had gotten so slow. I'd tried every spyware program I could find. Nada. I've spent a bit of time plowing through the registry looking for suspicious stuff. Nada.

It finally dawned on me that I had installed a virus/trojan/resource hog myself when I installed Norton last November. I did the standard XP uninstall and Viola! New life for my machine. I installed AVG free and noticed essentially no speed hit.

Actually getting rid of Norton was something else. I noticed that several norton processes were still running even after a reboot. The symantec directory in "program files" was gone but there was still lots of stuff in "program files\\common files\\symantic*"

I killed the processes and deleted the whole symantic tree. Then it took over an hour to root out all the symantec trash from the registry. They splattered crap everywhere.

One reboot later, karma abounds! I THINK norton was messing with my WiFi connection, probably one of the reasons thruput was so low despite having an excellent signal. I haven't had time to measure yet but it sure seems faster.

John

Reply to
Neon John

Well I have seen Norton Anti-Virus completely take over a 40g harddrive on an almost new Dell computer. I personally will not use that software, but my parents continue to use it. Now, thanks to Neon John's input, I might know why their computer runs much slower than mine. I am running PC-Cillin (trend) and AVG on my computers with very good results. I think ZoneAlarm (or possibly another program) does not like PC-Cillin and WinXP-SP2, or at least didn't in the past. I usually get some rebate with the trend product each year so it is not an expensive program to renew. Of course AVG is free and that 'seems' better! ;-) You must renew and update regularly so it can catch the newer viruses that try to infect your computer!

JMHO later, dave (One out of many daves)

Reply to
dave AKA vwdoc1

I made the discovery that Norton antivirus and other Symantec products like Systems Works were greatly slowing my computers down. My oldest laptop is

233 MHz and I keep it as a backup, but it couldn't run my DeLorme GPS. Before discarding it I experimented and found NAV was slowing it down by about a factor of four. My firewall at the time, Black Ice, was also slowing the computer. Faster computers are less affected, but my 700 MHz laptop was slowed by a factor of two by NAV. Needless to say I don't have NAV or System Works on any of my computers now. I have eTrust on two and AVG on one. A test showed that they slowed the computer down a negligible amount. I could not detect any decrease in speed. People still swear by Norton, but they just haven't learned to trust the other programs yet. The amazing and sad thing is how much the are spending on fast computers and how much they lose with Norton. Microsoft is bad enough but two hogs is not good.
Reply to
Jim Walker

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.