least bad antivirus software, please advise

I need to update my antivirus and I would like some advice. Over time, I have tested a number of antivirus software and I can’t decide which one is the best /least bad one.

1) OneCare: I have been testing it for a while, but I moved away from the US about a year ago and can’t purchase it now (the trial is expiring in a few days). Hopefully it will be available in Europe some time soon because it is the least intrusive and simplest I have ever tried.

2) Norton: it really takes a lot of resources, and has absolutely no tech support.

3) McAfee: it also uses a lot or resources and it makes the pc unusable when it is running a scan (anyone knows about tech support?).

4) Avast: I had plenty of false alarms, but it is free and tech support is very good. It is also very difficult  to fine tweak.

5) Panda: stay away: it was impossible to remove from my system and was very invasive!

6) Pc Clinic: I just want antivirus not everything together, but I have never tried it.

7) AVG: never tried it, your experience?

What is your advice? Thank you.

If you cant purchase OneCare I'd advise you go with avast!, aftering running all these products I have to say avast! has the best live and on-demand scanners not to mention that the boot-time scanning utility is just awesome. avast! is a bit bloated as you probaly know but it's worth it.

I seriously wouldnt reccomend going with any Symantec/Norton or McAfee products, having recently left my job as a CS rep at an ISP I can tell you that those products and the support behind them absolutely horrible. You're just about as secure running WinME with no security software as you are running Symantec/Norton or McAfee.

I cant speak for any of the other AVs except for AVG. AVG does it's job well when you tell it to scan, but it has no real time scanning ability which really is what kills the product. It has an extremely low footprint on the system but the lack of real time scanning and advanced features in the program really give it a low rating on my scale.

i use Kaspersky (AVP) - http://www.kaspersky.com/ it most of great antivirus, In my practice was many case (situation) when norton antivirus crash (to fall out) but Kaspersky live...

Do not use  McAfee and  Panda !

I'm a Norton user myself (Anti-Virus, not Internet Security). I've never found its resource usage to be all too high, and like the no bs UI. I can't comment on technical support because I've never needed any ...

I absolutely HATE Mcafee from having numerous bad experiences with it, not limited to it screwing up an OS so badly that the entire thing had to be scrapped and rebuild -- directly resulted from Mcafee's flaky uninstallation. I dislike its bull UI that tries to trick you into buying other products and find that it wastes a lot of resources.

I have installed the free copy of AVG on some computers and am pretty happy with it thus far. I like its no nonsense UI (although it could be lade out a bit more clearly) and how it updates its self without ever requiring restart. The ONLY bad thing I really have to say about Free AVG is that it doesn't seem to auto-update ... It will just warn you that it is out-of-date and you have to manual run the update tool.

I won't use OneCare this early for obvious reasons, and haven't tried a lot of the others listed (Anti-Virus products are not something I like to screw with).

AVG is great, reliable, uses minimal resources.  Using for years with (0) problems on both client and server machines.

Avast! is also a good product, but my experience has been limited.

McAfee used to have a bug that keeps the CPU usage to 100%, and they released the fix two years ago(on a Denmark server I think but not sure now). We consult their local dealer for this but they denied the presense of the service pack until last year. And finally we have our mail server running at 3% average...

I really haven't made up my mind of praise it or XXXX it for the above issue. But it's a relieve for our server for no longer need to tolerate the heavy loading.

I use AVG personally, and it works great as it should. I seldom download things from unknown site so the active scanner isn't a big issue for me.  (It HAS active scanner, just not a heavy weight one) And it's good to know you're safe when some virus email passed through the GroupShield but blocked by AVG's email scanner.

As someone said before, AVG don't take up much system resources so I have to say it's a decent choice for people who is careful enough and don't rely heavily on the active scanner.

The best anti-virus is yourself ! Its better to learn how viruses work and to prevent them from entering your system. Since past 4 years, I have not used any anti-virus, still no problem as I can detect viruse by inspection. Prevention is better than cure

Shreyas Zare

I've been using AVG for some years now. I'd certainly recommend it.

Regarding UnoriginalGuy's update problem, I've noticed that on a few machines, but it seems quite rare these days. I only know of one machine, on dial-up, that still does it.
Provided you set a suitable time for it to update, in the scheduler, you should have no problems.

It seems to run reliably, with very little impact on performance, even on 600Mhz machines.
I've seen it working well for lots of people, from home users to small businesses. It's simplicity is a refreshing change, when compared to other modern antivirus programs.

You've nothing to lose by trying out the free edition - if you don't like it, just get rid of it.

EDIT: If you're running Outlook 2007 Beta, switch off the incoming email scanner on the AVG Outlook plugin - otherwise it strips out the entire body of the message. (I found this out the hard way!)

I personally use NOD32.  I like it because it is very lightweight and unintrusive.  It hasn't let me down yet.

http://www.eset.com/

I use AVG on x64 - have not had one single problem, or false alarm.

I use McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, nowhere near as obtrusive as the home user version.

JeremyJ wrote:



I personally use NOD32.  I like it because it is very lightweight and unintrusive.  It hasn't let me down yet.

http://www.eset.com/

Thank you all for your replies.

I still haven’t made up my mind, but I will take your advice in consideration. For those of you who are suggesting being my own antivirus, I wish a lot of luck! Although I am convinced that the best virus defense is yourself, I have seen people without antivirus being attacked by viruses left and right. I want to use the internet freely and not worry about where I am going or what ports are open all the time (within a certain extent, of course) because you don’t need to open attachments or surf the web to be infected by some sort of virus, worm or similar.

I have tried them all, I have been running Avast for a while now and I actually forgot I was running it!  Its such a quiet little guy, never asks me anything, never runs a scan in the middle of the day while im working or anything.  I like it, it also has an interesting feature where it wont scan your computer if something is running in full screen mode, which is a god blessing for computer games!

I am using avast! and consider it the best (though, sometimes the CPU use goes up when viewing long XviD movies and having standard shield sensitivity at high). I only get false-positive for one file. The default avast! skin is not very intuitive and clear, so I downloaded a custom skin. On the other hand you only need to use the GUI for licence updates (once a year).

I used AVG for a while as well, but it seemed to do nothing and had some problems updating (I had to update virus definitions manually).

NOD came with PC, but it used too many resourcs, just like Kapersky.

Panda web based scanner seems to find a lot viruses, but it seems to be because of a conflict with avast! (as avast! finds a lot from Panda scanner).

I have not tried any newer versions of McAfee.

I'm from Estonia, so OneCare seems to be not an option.

I use Trend Micro PC-Cillin.  It's very good and seeminly light-weight.

Use Kasepersky Antivirus. Nothing beats it in the market today.