What Was Your First AntiVirus?

Mine was BullGuard which was essentially a combination of the BitDefender engine & the Outpost firewall. I quite liked it but eventually I decided to go with the AV that came with my ISP. Unfortunately that AV was Norton. Then they changed to McAfee.

In all fairness, McAfee was no problem at all, unlike Symantec's Norton which was nothing but trouble. Let alone, Norton let a trojan through my browser (which fortunately) SUPERAntiSpyware caught & removed. However, McAfee was overly heavy on my notebook though & slowed it down considerably. One day, after freezing my notebook, after an upgrade coincided with an MS upgrade I decided it had to go.

After a brief flirtation with The Panda Cloud I settled for MSE.

I just wondered what AV program was your first? Do you still use it?

 

Free 90 day trial of Norton. When it was up, used AVG. Tried McCrappy and dumped it in less than a week. Went back to AVG and used it for years. Been using MSE now for a couple of years on all my PC's and like it.

 

McAfee on wife's HP Pavilion. Tried Norton, AVG, Avira, Avast and TrendMicro.
Have settled for MSE on 3 comps and laptop, and use Avast on 3 others.

MSE would be my top choice. Neil.

 

Pretty sure it was McAfee, early 90's.

 

My first av was Norton, as it came stock on the old pc.. then went to Avg, until recently.. been using avast...and mse on other pcs

 

Yeah, it'll do that. They say that it has improved greatly since 2008/9. It probably has, but I doubt I'll ever use it again, even if it was given to me free.

Quite a few people still do this without ill effect. You have to know what you are doing a bit though. I firmly believe that browser-hardening can be a huge factor in this respect. Plus having some control over Javascripting & Java (Runtime).

Sounds like a good combination. I have the same on my notebook, except I have MBAM instead of Spybot.

 

I have only ever had one computer in seven years. And have installed Norton Internet Security and no other. I never had any problems as yet. And yes it will slow your computer down, that is because it is doing a thorough job of you system .So if you want a quick Antivirus get some other .

 

I don't think that it is a matter of the speed of the AV as much as its size on your system. My powerful custom-built 64 bit desktop hardly notices MSE & would probably deal with Norton well. My slightly underpowered notebook found Norton hard work. Not only that, it was inherently buggy & even fresh re-installs wouldn't fix it completely. Furthermore, I don't rate Norton's malware finding abilities too highly. At least I didn't have to pay for it as it was provided by my ISP (British Telecom). Even BT ditched it for McAfee!

To be totally honest, if you are running XP (SP3), Vista (SP2) or Win 7 I don't think that you need such heavy suites these days. I believe that the days of 'thorough' AVs are over. Microsoft firewalls weren't as good as they are now so there is no need IMO to install a suite/third party firewall & browsers are genuinely safer now through hardening. Most infections are going to be from unpatched Java Runtime or JavaScript overflows (often flash) or something akin to CSS attacks. Virtually all will be 'drive-bys'.

Anyway, that's just my philosophy, if Norton's working for you it's probably best to stick with it. I honestly do believe that they have drastically improved Norton over the past three or four years. A lot of these improvements started with the CARNIE_RIDE virus bug, where Norton would spend an inordinate amount of time searching for this malware. They more or less admitted that it was a bug on the Symantec forums.