I am thinking of ditching McAfee on my home PC when the current subscription expires, and going with one of the free AV programs. Any comments about Avast, AVG, ClamWin, etc. would be appreciated.
I use AVG (free). I've never had a virus (that I've known of), but it sits there and seems to do its job. I don't look at porn all day, and don't navigate to fishy sites and download tons of random attachments, and I sit behind a firewall... I guess it's like a smoke alarm... I can't really tell you how it works, because I've never had an infected PC, but it seems to sit there and do its job without much overhead or intrusion.
AVG is good. I've been running it for years and it's found some viruses. The best thing you can install is SpyBot S&D. It will monitor any changes to your registry and allow you to confirm or deny them. This is the best thing for keeping random stuff from getting installed. Also, AdAware is another good scanner to run periodically.
I use Avast and my experience is just like SMD above. Every once in a while it will catch something, but 99.9% of the time it just sits there. On AVG, can you turn off that little blurb it stamps on your emails? That would be annoying to me if I used it I think.
For the two Free versions mentioned - Avast seems to get the current 'thumbs up'; partly in regards to the newest AVG version is consisderably more bloated than past versions... but you might not care about that. (IIRC, AVG forced an upgrade to V8 - V7.5 no longer supported). Some will opine that Avast is currently more thorough. Benchmarking the two seems to change with the seasons. If the decision goes to AVG, Google on a custom install... I know that you can manually force those features that you might not need by installing thru a command line instead of the auto-install. (been awhile, so i can't conjure up a link). *check this poll - www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,21915664~viewpoll=1#poll21915664 (The site has been a great resource... got to the 'Security' forum and search there... highly recommended).
I'm looking at getting a new computer for my wife. One of the options is a 3 year subscription to McAffee for a 1 time price of $40. That seems like a great deal... or should I just save the $40 and use the free-ware?
I've been in IT Consulting for the last 11 years and highly recommend avoiding Norton and McAfee products like the plague. Bloated versions of both do nothing well and often crash necessitating uninstall/reinstall. I've used AVG for the last several years with great success. Also, I'd try and avoid Ad-Aware. While it was once a spectacular app, I'd say it too has become very much less effective, less reliable and more bloated. And in my opinion, Spybot is still a very good program but probably too much for the "average" to "below average" user.
I found that Avast was great on XP but worked for **** on Vista. It slowed the entire PC down even more than Vista normally ran. Switched to AVG and it made me change my opinion of Vista.
I swear by CounterSpy and VIPRE. $30/year and it's awesome. Very little resource use, and seems to catch everything. It came recommended to me by an MS security expert after he spent all night cleaning my machine from the crap that AdAware and AVG missed. Viruses aren't the problem anymore, it's malware and it can come from damn near anywhere. You don't have to download **** to get it, but searching for free software of any kind is a great way to catch it. He thinks I loaded a rogue version of Adware or AVG and that's what almost toasted my machine. Forgot to add: under no circumstance should anyone ever download a toolbar.
I had AVG for several years and it was great, but now I have NOD32 Antivirus and it's better and uses less memory... I use it in conbination with Malwarebytes which I run once in a while for random check ups or shady downloads that I may get from a torrent site... That combo has been flawless for me.
