Mcafee or Norton ?
Author
Discussion

kippax

Original Poster:

2,792 posts

279 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
quotequote all
My trial on Norton is about to expire & before I renew my brother has given me a new Mcafee anti virus package (Internet security suite 2006)is this as good as Norton or am I best renewing Norton subscription?
If I do keep Mcafee do I need to uninstall Norton frst?

Any advise gratefully received

Thanks
Howard.

FourWheelDrift

92,341 posts

314 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
quotequote all
Neither to be honest, you can get perfectly good anti-virus protection from AVG or Avast, both free versions or pay a smaller ammount for pro versions. There are others as well probably posted below this reply or above (if i'm slower at typing).

aldi

9,288 posts

267 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
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Salmonella or Bochalism?

BliarOut

72,863 posts

269 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
quotequote all
AVG Free and Zone Alarm Free = Job well done

agent006

12,058 posts

294 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
quotequote all
Just installing and updating McAffee Security Centre on some laptops for a client. By christ it's rubbish. We use the Enterprise edition internally and it's great. This one has taken 5 reboots so far and it's only updated half of the huge array of "features" it's got. Norton is far superior, or at least it was when i last used it in 2003.

malman

2,258 posts

289 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
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If you forced me to choose between the 2 then it would be Salmonella(mcafee). The corporate edition of Mcafee is OK but the retail stuff is just too flakey /intrusive. Whereas Norton is just a steaming pile of S&^% - there isn't a barge pole long enough.

AVG or AVAST + Zonelalarm or Sygate (all free)


>> Edited by malman on Monday 23 January 18:30

petros

2,441 posts

259 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
quotequote all
Avast, free and far better than both, updates daily as well

Teppic

8,088 posts

287 months

Monday 23rd January 2006
quotequote all
Don't touch McAffee or Norton - they are bloatware, slow your system down, increase your startup times and miss infections.

You're best bet is to go with either AVG or Avast for your anti-virus, and get ZoneAlarm as your firewall.

munky

5,328 posts

278 months

Tuesday 24th January 2006
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I use Norton Internet Security 2005 in conjunction with Microsoft anti spyware (seems to pick up more things than Spybot which I also have installed). Never had a virus or intrusion since, it doesn't seem to slow my system down and the 4 norton processes running are currently using a total 20Mb of RAM, which isn't much in the scheme of things. I've heard Norton is a bugger to uninstall though, should you ever wish to. Only problem I've ever had is the anti spam part of Norton (which you can switch off) very occasionally hangs Microsoft Outlook, solved by restarting Outlook. The popup ad blocker works very well, since I haven't seen one for months!

Plotloss

67,280 posts

300 months

Tuesday 24th January 2006
quotequote all
aldi said:
Salmonella or Bochalism?


Bingo!

kippax

Original Poster:

2,792 posts

279 months

Monday 20th February 2006
quotequote all
Teppic said:
Don't touch McAffee or Norton - they are bloatware, slow your system down, increase your startup times and miss infections.

You're best bet is to go with either AVG or Avast for your anti-virus, and get ZoneAlarm as your firewall.



OK then I have downloaded Avast & Zone Alarm & installed them on my laptop does everyone agree that this is better then using norton or mcafee as subscription on desktop has now also expired & I will do the same on there if so. I do have an unopened mcafee suite but says on box needs 100meg of space!!

If this Avast is as good why is it free?? or am I being too cautious?

I will bow to peoples better knowledge as I am just above the computer numpty stage


Thanks
Howard.

jaytee368

2,058 posts

274 months

Monday 20th February 2006
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I'm watching this thread as my Norton subscription (Antivirus and Internet Security) has just expired.
Hedging towards the recommended Avast + Zonealarm.
kippax said:
If this Avast is as good why is it free?? or am I being too cautious?

This is a good question, any takers?

Also, as mentioned earlier, is it true that Norton is difficult to uninstall, I've heard this before too?
Are there some follow-up actions to do after running the Norton uninstaller?

TIA,

JT.

jamieboy

5,929 posts

259 months

Monday 20th February 2006
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kippax said:
If this Avast is as good why is it free?? or am I being too cautious?
Avast and AVG provide a perfectly good and effective but slightly cut-down version of their products for free. Once you get to like and trust the free one, they reckon that you'll be more likely to upgrade to another one of their products (which are not free, but are competitive) rather than switch to another vendor altogether, if you decide that you need more functionality.


>> Edited by jamieboy on Monday 20th February 14:32

neil_cardiff

17,113 posts

294 months

Monday 20th February 2006
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Either versions of these companies home products are nasty, horrible, and a real pain to use properly. Indeed Norton is so bad that it's universally hated...

If you can find someone willing to sell you the corporate versions mind then I can recommend NAI's McAfee Enterprise product.

However, this probably doesn't help you, and I've only heard good things about AVAST and AVG - with AVG seeming to be the one everyone loves. Give them a try, you can't go worng.

Basicly you just want a tool that does one thing only i.e. scans files for nasties.

No fancy graphs telling you how secure you are, no *frickin* firewalls, and especially no deleting email without at least letting me see what its deleting...

I'd imagine from what I've heard that AVG does just that. IIRC its one of the products that does hourly updates, but that could be a paid for service - I just don't know.

Hope that helps

Neil

shadytree

8,291 posts

279 months

Monday 20th February 2006
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BliarOut said:
AVG Free and Zone Alarm Free = Job well done


I'll second that

rsvmilly

11,288 posts

271 months

Monday 20th February 2006
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jaytee368 said:
I'm watching this thread as my Norton subscription (Antivirus and Internet Security) has just expired.
I was in the same position as you. I uninstalled Norton (in about three attempts, what with Liveupdate etc). I immediately installed AVG and ran it. It found a couple of virusses which must have been missed by Norton for ages.

rednotdead

1,256 posts

256 months

Monday 20th February 2006
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Echo all that has been said about AVG, Avast and Zonealarm, they are the top bananas for free and effictive products.

However - if you are in the market for AVG's 'non-free' tools, drop me a PM...............

annodomini2

6,971 posts

281 months

Monday 20th February 2006
quotequote all
Free - AVG and Zone Alarm

Would also recommend: Ad-Adware and Spybot for spyware protection.

If you want high quality home pc security and prefer the concept that paying for it is better then get:

Anti-Virus: Kapersky Labs (Very Very Good Anti-virus)

Firewall: Keiro Personal firewall (Good basic setup and very configurable).

Aranell

868 posts

254 months

Monday 20th February 2006
quotequote all
jaytee368 said:


Also, as mentioned earlier, is it true that Norton is difficult to uninstall, I've heard this before too?


It's not difficult to uninstall but it has a tendancy to leave bits all over the place.

Mind you, it's hard to find anything which uninstalls itself totally from a machine anyway.

bigdods

7,175 posts

257 months

Monday 20th February 2006
quotequote all
AVG and ZoneAlarm - I have truly lost count of the number of times someone brings me a machine and says - ' I went to PC world and they sold me Norton and now the damn thing wont connect to the internet'

With Any PC that comes to me I always strip out Norton first 90% of the time this solves all the problems, then a full scan with AVG and add ZoneALarm. Worst one I found was a friends PC with fully up to date norton the PC was just dying - it had 4 viruses that Norton kept picking up but then was unable to fix. AVG sorted them in a few seconds :-)