Looking for the best antivirus and firewalls

have been trying to decide the best security suite to install on clients machines. there is conflicting reviews out there for norton internet security, bitdefender professional, trendmicro internet security, etc.

some rate norton the best and then another review rates them very poor. same types of reviews for other sft.

would like some opinions for you all as to what you think is the best security suite to use.

personally i use norton 2005 antivirus and zonealarm for the firewall. now zonealarm does seem to get the best firewall protection reviews but am looking for one package to install for my clients.

thoughts would be appreciated.

 

gghartmann--If all you will consider are the suites, then I would suggest Norton Internet Security. However, I, personally, pick and choose and, like you, have NAV and ZA, as well as MSAntiSpyware, AdAware, SpybotS&D, and SpywareBlaster. And do not forget the Security and Privacy settings in Internet Explorer itself.

 

havent done the msspyware yet. aint it still a beta ???

i also install spybot, ad-aware and spywareblaster.

personally have used za and nav for many years but am afraid if i install different sft suites my clients will just get confused. especially when it comes to letting the updates run. this way with one suite then its easy to tell them anything that says ex: norton let the updates through.

i read 3 different reviews from 3 different sites and all were different. one rated norton in 7th place out of ten, another had bitdefender number 1 then another said bitdefender was worthless. i tried using panda security and that is a piece of junk crashed 2 new dell systems to the point had to do a system restore to get rid of it.

i go back and forth between norton security, trendmicro security and just installed bitdefender for the first time. seems okay. install, etc was easy enough although the scan of the hard drive seemed a little slow but thats probably because the machine is a celeron 1.7 with only 128mb ram on xp.

have had a few clients have nothing but problems with norton even though i have not experienced that. i totally hate mcafee.

thanks for the input.

 

I'll stick with my recommendation of eTrust EZ Armor. If it's good enough for 99% of the Fortune 500 companies, it's good enough for me. That download link has another 1 year free trial available until 8/1/05

EDIT......just looked again and see the free trial is for the AV only.

 

noahdfear

okay gotta ask why do you like ez ??? dont believe that one is even rated in the top 10 of any reviews i looked at. why exactly do you like it ???

 

etrust is not as "resource consuming" as Norton, thus, a better choice on older machines with hardware limits. etrust updates and behaves responsibly, and has a user interface that even a newbie can understand. On a newer machine, you won't notice Norton, except if you decide to uninstall it. Then, be prepared to reinstall the whole OS if you really want Norton gone. My two cents.
Johanna

 

Johanna

boy, do i agree with you on uninstalling norton. once installed it dont wanna let go. ive had to on many occassions manuall clean the registry and that can take a while.

thanks for info on ez. i will remember that on older machines i work on. just wish there was 1 good firewall - antivirus suite that all reviews agreed on but i havent seen one yet.

 

You asked...........

Besides what Johanna has already pointed out, with eTrust I know my machine is protected. I study alot of HijackThis logs, and click on alot of links, both to ActiveX controls and sites, which are infected, just so I can get a better idea of what the user might have on his/her machine that isn't visible in a log. When I hit an infected site, eTrust tells me and clears the infected files from my TIFs, unless I shut down the Real-time Monitoring, which I do often.

I've used Norton and AVG. Both allowed infections on my machine that they didn't even see. eTrust found and removed them. I can honestly say that with eTrust, I have never gotten a virus that I did not intentionally allow. A friend once sent me a copy of an email virus via file transfer, that slammed many of the users on the ISP........yep it got past their protection too. Before the transfer had even finished, my eTrust had already shut it down and deleted it. The friend's Norton AV hadn't yet recognized it as infected (though it did later in the day after an update). I disabled the real-time and got the file, then installed it. When eTrust woke up, I scanned and it found and removed over 1000 infected files accross two drives and three partitions (the virus copied 14 files to every folder with the word share in it's name).

When a client's comp comes in infected and with up-to-date Norton, Panda, Bit-Defender, McAfee, whatever, it leaves with eTrust, and I have rarely ever had a call back to remove a virus. I've never had to do a manual Live Update (followed by a necessary reboot....yuk)......the auto-downloader works flawlessly. When it updates, on cable I see a flash accross the screen......with dial-up it may take 30 or 40 seconds, and it doesn't rob all my bandwidth to do it.

The firewall that accompanies the EZ Armor suite is Zone Alarm. Not much to tell you there you don't already know.

In my mind (may not be reality), eTrust also got a Microsoft endorsment when MS issued an eTrust EZ Armor cd (free for a year) with the Security Updates CD in early 2004. Some may not view that as a plus, but I do. I also know of several others, that do much the same thing I do on this forum, that depend on eTrust to protect their machines, some of them being Microsoft MVPs for Security.

Now that I have come off sounding like a spokesman for eTrust , I'll close with this statement. Reviews don't mean much to me when it comes to protecting my data.........performance does, and eTrust has proven it's performance for me.

 

noahdfear

are you sure ez is not paying for that endorsement. if not you should be. ha.

thank you for the detailed reason it is appreciated. i will give the sft a try. now just have to search the web for the best price. normally, i can find the others at very good prices ( oem ) so hopefully i can find the same with ez.

again thanks.

 

Nope, no payment other than good protection.......not even a complimentary free lifetime subscription (somebody, hurry.....link this thread to eTrust! LOL). I hope it serves you as well.

 

Hey Dave
I have been a McAfee user for 7 years now. I have never had a major problem and have never had a virus slip through, But Some of my emails that have attachments are not being scanned. It's like if I have more then one email with attachments one gets scanned and the others don't.
I contacted McAfee about this and they told me to "save" the attachments to my hard drive and they will be scanned in doing this.
But this seems like an extra step to me, I asked why the attachments are not scanned coming into my computer via email and they would not give me a direct answer. This started happening when I went to DSL.

So My question is, I pay McAfee yearly for the subscription...auto updates. Is this the same with etrust? you pay them yearly and get auto updates? also, I seen on their web site something about DR. where you can download it for free for 1 year.
Can you tell me what this is? It says it's recommended.

I don't like Norton's (sorry Norton lovers) I want to know, is etrust as easy to deal and work with as McAfee?
I pay them and I don't have to do anything else That's the way I like it, they get my money and they do all the work. Also I get a email telling me when I need to renew so I don't have to worry about it expiring on me and having to remember when I need to renew.
Do they do this?

Geri

 

My wife and I use (on our separate systems) Trend Micro's Internet Security suite (includes firewall and anti-virus). It updates itself daily and is extremely easy to configure (or I couldn't do it! )

Never much cared for McAfee (sorry) and Norton (I had it for several years and found it just ate into my resources way too much).

 

Hi Geri!

Yes, you pay for upgrades yearly, and they send out reminders well in advance. I think the suite (AV/Firewall) is about $30 a year renewal. And yes, it's easy to deal with. Pay and set to auto-update. Schedule scans if you prefer to manual scans. Don't think you'll see it scanning emails, or anything else the real-time monitor scans. You'll just get notified if something is infected. It does it silently in the background.

Not sure what you're referring to with DR.........the AV? Yes, there is a free year download of that available right now.

 

No contest. I used the Norton suite for years and kept it current and it just grew and grew until it took over my computer. I tried Computer Associates eTrust free offer about 2 years ago and never looked back I bought it the second month and keep it updated. It is very cheap and very easy to administer. And that is my 2 cents.

I am not sure but I think the eTrust and ZA are the same thing.

Computer Associates
Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), one of the world's largest management software companies, delivers software and services across operations, security, storage, life cycle and service management to optimize the performance, reliability and efficiency of enterprise IT environments. Indeed, our solutions touch many areas of everyday life, from ATM transactions to airport security to online sales, customer service and medical information.

 

Hi,

I've always used Norton System Works, more than five years now with no problems, but stuck with 2003 using ZAP for the firewall.
However, I have lately installed Zone Alarm with Anti-virus for three friends who are new to computers. They are very pleased with the ease of use, very suited to newbies, and I am most impressed myself.
If I do get problems with the NAV part of System Works, I shall be changing to the ZA with Anti-virus.

Roger

 

i had no idea that zonealarm also did the antivirus thing. i really like the firewall but now will have to look into the suite version as well as just the firewall and virus product. if they do antivirus as good as they do the firewall then this would be the product to use.

 

I can't tell you how glad I am for this thread right now!
I've been a dedicated Norton user since 1997 and have been a happy customer until a few months ago. I have installed SystemWorks 2005 and Systemworks 2005 Premier on different machines (one "regular ", 3 "premier ") and every single one of them has had problems!
The "least" of the machines had a 700 Mhz celery with 512 megs of ram, two are 1 gig P3 machines with 768 megs of ram, and the other is a 3.2 gig P4 with 2 gigs of ram--we're not running short on resources here (and none of the problems were resource related).
The "least" machine is the only one on which I've been able to resolve the problem that showed up. The rest either have more than one problem, and/or the problems can't be solved using any of the "fixes" in the Norton Knowledge Base. Contacting Symantec had proved fruitless for these machines.
The SystemWorks 2005 installation one of the P3 machines (the one my oldest daughter uses, that I installed the latest SystemWorks on so there would be more protection with her IM-ing), decided it needed to be "re-initialized" (read: re-registered), so stopped doing anything until that was done. As a result, my first-ever virus infections! I spent a Sunday afternoon cleaning up that machine and making sure the others on the network hadn't been infected as a result. So, in addition to hours spent trying to get the program to either start when it's supposed to, or shut down when I turn the computer off (CCapp hangs randomly--no fix in site), I lost more time because Norton didn't do the main thing I bought it for!
I've also had to purchase a separate defragmenter because Speed Disk takes hours and no longer does a very good job, and I recently tried a free trial of a registry repair utility that found 356 items that Norton's One Button Checkup has ignored. Since running that free trial, my machine now boots quicker and programs load faster. That was the last straw, and the only thing left for me has been to find an antivirus program.
I've been using Zone Alarm, AdAware, and Spybot Search & Destroy for the other duties on these machines, so that part is already handled.
I'm getting a new hard drive for the P4 machine next week and will be loading everything fresh, so this thread was just in time! It will be eTrust for me!
Norton's days with me are done.

Dave H

BTW, Trend Micro was in the running until last week when their virus definition updates shut down thousands of computers belonging to both individual users and several enterprises. It's a rare incident, but another headache I don't need. I also gave a good, hard (and open-minded) look at the Zone Alarm antivirus (which includes the firewall, so you uninstall your current product if you are using the Pro version like I am) but I had a very hard time getting an answer out of them about when their virus definitions are updated. Having lived with Symantec's weekly auto-updates, I wanted something more pro-active. The best answer I got from Zone Alarm was "every week or two, unless there is a significant threat, in which case we have updated as often as twice in a day "

 

just looked at the reviews and everything regarding zonealarms security suite and again if they do the virus thing as well as the firewall then this is the way to go.

have 4 new dells sitting in my office that i will use ez security and zonealarm security suite on and then will make a decision on what protection to use in future for all the machines i get in. one suite to cover all protection aspects is the way to go especially with my client base. less for them to worry about. i was a norton supporter for as long as its been out but have had some stange errors and reinstallation problems with my clients that norton has not been able to help with so am leaning away from them big time.

have tested on some machines -
* trendmicros security suite and it seems okay,
* have used bitdefender security and again it seems okay,
* panda security crashed 2 new systems its worthless.
* mcafee have never liked them especially years back when you had to be a genius to figure out how to keep the dat files updated and figure out where on their site to get the downloads.

Now we'll see about ez and zonealarm.

 

While I don't exactly have "clients ", I have family and friends who refer to me lovingly as "tech support ". This amounts to about a dozen computers, and none of these folks are into computers like I am, so "simpler is better ". This is why Norton was always a good choice.
With Symantec products behaving the way they are now (which is to say "badly "), I am adopting a new method of operation, which is "better is better ".
I've already had to educate all these folks on using the different firewall and adware/spyware products, I can educate them on the others. If you are doing this as a business, it is certainly more time-consuming and labor intensive for you, which cuts into your margins, but so does using flaky products!
I had to scoff at an article I read last week about Symantec now offering an anti-spyware product and how it would "have people opening their wallets ". Not if I can help it!

Dave H

 

Has anyone tried a firewall from Sygate?

I purchased System Suite 5 a while back, and it came with the SG firewall, as well as a virus scanner.

I didn't care too much for the anti-virus program, due to system slowdowns, but the firewall has worked well for me.