Originally posted here by nihil
Hi Carenath I have to support HTRegz regarding Norton. McAfee is pretty much the same. You really need a modern, powerful machine for them to run smoothly. You also need to keep them up to date as both have been known to issue updates that produced performance issues that needed subsequent patching.


Well, I used to use McAfee until they screwed it up when porting to windows from DOS. During my DOS days, McAfee, Norton AV, F-Prot and (now defunct) Thunderbyte Anti-Virus were the best AV tools available. I used a collection of approximately 80,000 someodd viruses to check different AV products on the - then - market and found that between those four, they found every one. I guess I am partial to NAV simply because of my past experience with them, but I havn't found anything else that does as well and does it for free. While I don't necessarily like spending the money for the subscriptions, I'd prefer going with something I know than something I don't. Most of the "free" AV products are limited in some way anyways.

Another little "trick" you might like to consider is to update all your AV and anti-malware applications. Then reboot into safe mode and defragment your hard drive. This will pull all the pattern/signature files together, and make the applications run faster, smoother and more stable.

You should do this on a regular basis.

As far as updating, I do THAT on a VERY regular basis. My current list of AV and Anti-malware is Spybot S&D, Spyware Guard, Avast, as well as Spyware Guard and MS Anti-Spyware Beta. Other software I use to try and keep my system clean and "neat" are Tuneup Utils 2006, Mindsoft Utils XP9, Index DAT Spy as well as a few others. I am always in the market for "new and improved" software to keep my system safe and malware free. As far as defraging, I admit I probably do not do that as often as I should, but I sometimes tend to be lazy in that respect.

Regards and God Bless!

Carenath