What anti-virus do you use?

[Live_to_cook]

My McAfee blew up, and service is nonexistent.

Considering Norton, $50 a year includes a year of automatic updates online.

What do you use? Does it seem to work?

[thebighat]

My computer got infected with something this summer that eventually caused me to get a new hard drive. I don't understand how this part of it happened. The computer came with MacAfee, but I had bought a subscription to Norton, twice. When the tech reinstalled all the software, MacAfee went back on, and my subscription to Norton was gone. So I had to pony up 30 bucks to get current with MacAfee. I liked Norton better. I belong to a Yahoo brick oven group and someone on that list has SoBig because my mailbox has a lot of those Re:details messages. I just ran a scan and I'm clean. And a word of warning...I was very lucky to be able to back up My Documents folder before the computer crashed, because I lost EVERYTHING else. I think the kids probably got the virus from Kazaa, which is also now gone. Who needs 10 gigs of lousy music anyway?

[phatch]

I use Norton and Tiny Personal Firewall. Additionally, I do not accept HTML email nor do I use an email tool that supports scripting. Those are both disasters and serve no safe computing purpose. Norton scans all incoming and outgoing mail and updates virus defintions every other day.

Never had a problem.

Phil

[Mezzaluna]

We're a Norton family, too. We also have Zone Alarm for the firewall. I don't want to say it too loud, but nothing has gotten through yet. We also have a firewall on our router (according to my electrical engineer husband). His work had pretty stiff requirements for that if he was going to be able to work on stuff from home.

[thebighat]

I had the free download of Zone Alarm before the puter crashed and we had Kazaa on the beast. It was unbelieveable to me how fast and how many times we had other computers trying to access. Within seconds, seconds, of installing zone alarm it started registering hits, that eventually numbered into the tens of thousands. I went into one of the logs and got an ip address and then did a yahoo search just for that number and son of a gun if didn't come back with a hit from someone's web site who said his hobby was pinging other computers.

[Mezzaluna]

Just goes to show you, the web is a place to be watchful! Everyone needs defenses from electronic attack. If I had kids, I'd also have a net nanny of some type. Man, they can really get you if you're not careful.

[phatch]

I'm not impressed with the auto filters such as Net Nanny. They won't share what they're blocking with you. Research shows they block a fair amount of political sites based on their own personal agenda. They are also fairly primitive filters and often block even cooking sites with words like breast, whip, beat, thigh and so on as trigger words.

[KyleW]

At one point in my life I had a lot of Norton stuff on my computer, Anti-Virus, Utilities etc. I had a problem with Utilities and ther support sucked. They pretty much told me that unless I was willing to pay per incident, they weren't willing to help. I took every piece of Norton Software off my machine. I now have McAfee Anti Virus, McAfee Internet Security and McAfee Personal Firewall running, all without incident. So far so good and it's been 2 years. Also, because I have a cable connection that is always on, I am behind a hardware firewall.

[phatch]

Free or cheap technical support is virtually non-existent any more.

Phil

[kokopuffs]

I've used PC Cillin for over a year and it seems to work fine. The anti virus software is updated weekly automatically.

[Pete]

Recently my anti-virus detected a Trojan Horse on my computer. It is not doing anything, but I can't seem to remove it. Norton detected it but can't seem to quarantine or remove it. Supposedly though, norton is supposed to detect if it becomes active and at that point should be able to shut it down.

[KyleW]

Can you delete it from Explorer, rather from inside Norton?

[markface]

From everything i've read , and from personal experience , i have found that most of the bigger name anti-virus software companies put out good products . i've used pc cillin , mcafee , norton , and a few not so well known brands . they all do well as long as you keep them updated . i'm currently using norton with zone alarm firewall . being as i'm on an old fashioned phone connection , i dont have to worry so much about a heavy duty fire wall . if your running on a broadband connection , then a hardware firewall is almost a must . most of the software firewalls are pretty easy to bybass if you know what your doing . the same thing applies to virus protection . there are hundreds of new viruses coming out every day , and its hard for even the best anti virus software to keep up with them all . if you find that you have a trojan , key logger or some other infection already resident on you pc , then there are several software packages out there that are designed to remove them . one nice one is ad-aware put out by lavasoft . you can find it on download.com and its freeware so no extra expense . kazaa is a real big problem as it comes bundled with spyware and adware built in .

[Pete]

I can't remove it from anywhere, as Explorer doesn't even find the file where it is, nor does my search feature. It is in a file that starts out c:\RECYCLER\S..... then a whole lot of numbers.

[KyleW]

I'm pretty sure that RECYCLER files are just back ups of Recycle Bins that have been emptied. You should be able to safely delete these files in their entirety.