Avira free or Norton Internet Security???

Cocopara said:

scoopeeedoo said:

This morning's outcome :
Avira is far behind with 2 points...
Many other suggestions about other choices ("5 points"),
but Norton seems to have fought his ol'demons and reached a lot of user's trust now, he gets 9 points...
Thanks to all of you, i'll have a look this afternoon, after work, and probably will make my (hard!) choice...

Indeed, Avira is like Avast, Rubbish.
Norton really is a rubbish Anti Virus, compared to many others, but it works, if your one off those teenagers whos curious, like to download new and unknown programs, get Kaspersky or eset :P, with Zonealarms firewall (10x beter then window's)

... a 40 y old curious teenager... :) ... curious but rather prudent!
I would love Kaspersky, but would have to pay for it while i can use Norton freely... I prefer put my money in other apps... or support creators...!

Well, there are other means to achive licens, mentioning none, there are also legal way off doing this. But as a freeware, and "if we consider non - trials" MSE is amongst the best anti viruses, but by no means does it compare to kaspersky, Zone alarm (Not sure of its anti virus, but heard good stuff) or Eset.

What i like about the MSE is that its:
-free
-consumes low amount of memory
-does not bother you
-and search VERY deeply into your PC, compared to other freeware such as AVG free

-consumes low amount of memory

The MsMpEng.exe (MSE) uses about 50MBs. But I do not remember what Kaspersky and NIS used because I do not have a system with those any more (I used them in previous years). Maybe someone can post the numbers for comparison.

whs said:

-consumes low amount of memory

The MsMpEng.exe (MSE) uses about 50MBs. But I do not remember what Kaspersky and NIS used because I do not have a system with those any more (I used them in previous years). Maybe someone can post the numbers for comparison.

50 Mb aint much, and KAspersky and Eset sure use more, MSE uses low amount of Memroy, 4mb, forgot if it was RAM or Hard Drive :P

Interesting numbers. That would suggest that Norton and Kaspersky use less RAM than MSE (against popular belief and if that is the whole story). But all of those numbers are so small that it does not matter much anyhow. The whole RAM usage "problem" is usually blown completely out of proportion.

I have Firefox running with 16 tabs open. NIS2010 is using 10MB of RAM.

It usually fluctuates between 2MB (lasts for few seconds) and 15MB.

Avast! Free uses very similar amounts of RAM...except when scanning. It uses only 14MB on a full system scan. Norton uses 40MB (testing now) on a full system scan and completes a full scan far quicker than Avast!

Avira Personal is a good program but I found several problems with it:

1) Update server is excruciatingly slow.
2) Product support is virtually non-existent.
3) When I upgraded to premium, the updater stopped working. After several clean installs and removing all previous registry entries, Avira suggested that I reinstall Windows. That's when I told them aufwiedersehen and installed Avast.

As far as Norton goes, I've heard very good reviews of it starting with the 2009 version. Prior to that it was garbage. The detection rate was decent but the program used a lot of resources. I remember back in early 2000-2001 when it was truly a p.o.s. and back then there weren't any malware or firewall modules built into it. It was a plain antivirus program that caused Windows to come to a virtual standstill when it was running. But apparently they improved a lot since then. If the Norton suite provided by your ISP gives you a more comprehensive security package my suggestion would be to use it over Avira Personal.

Thanks again to all of you for your interesting comments, i think my choice is done now...
I'm gonna run Norton... I just hope Avira will let uninstall itself without prob'...
Well, i guess that work will be perfectly accomplished by "Avira Registry Cleaner", "Tune Up" & "CCleaner"...
You really helped me, Folks, Thank you!!!