Please, please don't recommend Norton products to anyone. McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc. are just plain garbage. There's really no reason to use anything besides Microsoft Security Essentials. This is coming from a long-time hacker/programmer/nerd/IT worker
Somethingawful may be a low-brow comedy site with some fairly NSFW stuff in certain areas, but the Serious Hardware/Serious Crap sub-forum has a sticky thread that really is the best advice around on computer security for average users:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3448981
I wanted to respond to Rob Hurkes’ statement to not recommend Norton and/or Symantec products to anyone based on his experience in the IT industry. Hopefully there is a segment of this forum that would prefer to research the antivirus and/or security products they use before blindly accepting one person’s personal opinion. I vividly remember the early to mid 2000s when the general consensus among technology experts was that Norton was a hog and very heavy on system resources. I too was among those who used Norton Antivirus in 2003/2004, but decided to switch to Kaspersky based on recommendations made in product reviews by the respective staff members at Maximum PC and CPU. These magazines are higher quality productions that typically perform head-to-head tests of security suites on an annual basis. Kaspersky was their favorite at the time, so I decided to give it a whirl for a couple of years. In 2007 Symantec gained some traction when they redesigned their program offerings from the ground up and the reviewers had nothing but good things to say – in fact they gave the Norton products some of the highest marks against the competition.
At the time there were so many good products and I had multiple bootable partitions to install AV/Security software to, so I took the plunge and installed just about every product I was interested in. During a two year period from roughly 2007 – 2008 I actively used and tested these products for their functionality: Web Root Spyware Scanner, Malwarebytes, Lavasoft Adaware, Panda Platinum Security, ISS Black Ice, Bit Defender Internet Security, Norton Internet Security, F-Secure Internet Security, and Kaspersky Security Suite. Prior to that period of time (2001 – 2006) I used a couple of other products such as: McAfee, Trend Micro PC-cillin, and Sygate and Comodo stand alone firewalls. To make a long story short, I’ve evaluated a lot of products over the years and I’ve arrived at 3 favorites in this order.
- Norton Internet Security 2012
- Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 2012
- F-Secure Internet Security 2010 (the last version I used)
After this subject was brought to my attention I found some interesting websites – organizations that test security products using a standard methodology and rate them according to the results. If you are interested here are some of the more interesting links I came across during my research.
This first link shows products that have won a product of the year award for the last several years
here.
The second link shows a security product's effectiveness at removing malware if your PC should become infected. Pay particular attention to the summary scores on page 7 of the report by clicking
this link.
This page is interesting. A product can score as many as 18 points in 3 categories. According to the report results, Norton scored 15 out of 18, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) scored 13.5 out of 18, and Avira scored 14 out of 18. Check your favorite product score by clicking this
link.
If you're curious like me you can peruse the two websites these reports come from until your heart is content as there is a lot of useful information there. I was happy to discover that my favorite 3 products scored very well in the various categories. Those three would be: Norton, Kaspersky and F-Secure.
Lastly, here is a
short and sweet review of MSE that sums up the product features very well. I’m sure there are other users here who will find other reviews that cast MSE in much better light, so if you find such an article feel free to post a link so we can all check it out. My intention was never to imply that MSE is an inferior product, but to defend my position for recommending Norton products. I hope this helped to shed some light on why I recommend Norton products in the first place. It’s based on several years of test driving these products and sifting through what I believe are the better offerings out there. When I login to my online banking the last thing I want to see is a big bagel for an account balance, so that's another reason I believe in purchasing a security product and keeping it updated throughout the year. Sorry for the long winded reply.
