Light/good antivirus/firewall

[c627627]

Norton definitions have always been one of the best updated but since so many people got burned so bad by old versions of Norton, if anyone even mentions Norton - you used to get so many negative replies because how bad the old versions were in slowing down the system, messing up the system and inserting themselves into Windows startup and staying there, even after you uninstalled the product.


I'd say today, the only question is why pay for it when Avira is there and can pretty much match the definitions for free. But otherwise, the latest version is not as bad as the old ones to actually use and Norton's definitions have always been in the top 3.

It's difficult to say who has "the best" definitions but top 5 would be Trend Micro, Kaspersky, McAffee, Avira and Norton.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

No, since norton 360 i think it was when they redid most of the code base, Norton has actually been very very highly rated on av-comparatives, but old habbits and problems are hard to get people to accept they have changed.

McAffee, that is one i will never touch.. are they rating any better or still the bottom of the barely on detection rates and resources?

 

[c627627]

Well, I was only talking about definitions, not system resource usage.

There may be reasons not to use McAffee but their definitions are not that bad. Bottom of the barrel as far as products being used by a lot of people go is probably AVG. Nod32 is pretty bad. Avast is just a notch above them but still not as good as the others.

I don't think MSE's defs are great but that is not why people use MSE, they made a product that's easy to use and so people feel it's 'good enough' and they have a sizeable market share based on that.



Of the five I mentioned, probably Norton and Trend Micro and Avira have the best defs. Followed by Kaspersky and McAffee. But it's really hard to talk about these things when you have people saying "Sure the "TESTS" may not show it, but such & such product is the best." Whatever that means. Or you have people saying how they own a computer shop and such & such product has the least number of customers coming in for repairs. But that is all subjective.

I say: hang around computer forums and you kind of get the idea about which products are not as quick to defend you against zero day threats.


Originally a long time ago, tests were done here and they were pretty accurate as far as rankings went back then and not all that much has changed. I had a good way to confirm these results at the time. I had a something get through and I saved the virus which actually managed to slip into my system. I then installed all the programs just to test which ones would detect it. I remember Avira did straight away and Norton did a day later, so as far as zero day definitions go, this very old chart was pretty accurate: