firewall, antivirus which is best?

[russian rocket]

time to renew my internet security

which package is best. currently using Norton internet security 2006, had no problems with intrusion, seems to have detected potential problems in incoming email. but it does cripple system performance

[FrootBat]

General concensus in the industry is that Kaspersky has the best scan engine.
McAfee, Trend's PC Cillin are prob next best
Norton is known to eat system resources
Panda is ok

Theyre all paid ones.
Free ones: AVG, Avast are prob the front runners. Combine with zonealarm too.

[toni896]

if you have xp and a firewall/router, the XP build in is ok, and avg/avast.

[roadsweeper]

I use Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security v14. It is excellent software and comes with anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, wireless network intrusion scanning, Windows vulnerability checking, etc. and it is well priced. Microsoft use Trend Micro for hotmail which is perhaps as good a recommendation as there could be.

[tycho]

Ahhhhh, the dreaded N word....

Remove Norton and get AVG. That alone will feel like you've upgraded your pc
I use this with Windows Defender and my routers firewall and have never had any problems.

[ThePassenger]

Antivirus is easy. Not McAffee, Norton or Symantec. At least not their home user stuff. AVG, nod32, Kaspersky, etc are all better in that they don't use as many system resources nor are they all that common and thus not targeted by viruses.

Firewalls, are a little bit trickier. In a lot of common, home user and corporate scenarios running around with WinXP-SP2's firewall is good enough (usually when the system is hidden behind a NAT router), ZoneAlarm is a better solution if the machine is directly connected to the internet.

However, both of those have issues. SP2's firewall can be disabled by viruses and malicious ActiveX controls. ZoneAlarm can be a pain and lock your whole connection out, it can also be a pain to uninstall or upgrade in some circumstances.

However, AVG-Free, XP-SP2 and NAT haven't seen me wrong yet at home; but then I don't tend to surf porn or dodgy sites... and if I did I'd use VMware's little firefox virtual application.