What's the Best Anti-virus?

Yeah a bit of a no brainer - literally Gary and I agree that probably Norton is fine by most people now I must admit I haven't tried it for a long time and they have maybe got their act together, but well as with most things whats one mans pudding is another mans dose of gastric lol!!

I still maintain that it is the responsibility of the user to be careful as to what they download or use from the net particularly. One can have the best in the world but you can put money on some ratbag getting through if you don't use caution.

I had Webroot after my initial Win 7 install and it would cause BSODs or hang the system daily. It worked fine with XP. I brought it to their support and of course it was my fault and their software was good. They had no solution is what they meant.

When trying Webroot's SpySweeper some time back I found it provided false positives and missed actual bugs! I place that one in the McAFail catagory as far as security programs.

Norton or the other common suite Symantec System Works held the bloatware rep for a good number of years. The trend now however is on internet security where most of the malwares are floating around to begin with. The updated versions of the older programs are following that direction with less bloat being seen.

What was and still is a popular item by Symantec to date is Norton Ghost. That always saw a good rep over the years. The emphasis seen now in the current security trend however is on performance over resource grabbing.

Having a new lighter program available focusing on internet security is one way they compete. The independent reviews may not seem as swayed but tend to favor the longer established names rather then the newer programs with an updated foundation to work from.

Hum there seems to be a lot of talk re resource hogging and I must say that the two I like Kaspersky and Comodo Premium (for the testers) have never "hogged" my resources if it means slowing the boot up or slowing down once up and running.

In fact now I have the SSD I cannot say there is any "hogging" at all and I just get the impression maybe falsely that everyone is so preoccupied with this issue?

I just accept that my machines take a time to warm up and thats it no more than when I travel in the car - unlock the car, open the door get in, put on the seat belt, turning the key and wait for the engine to fire put it in drive and then move off. Could that be made any faster? or is my analogy simplifying this a bit too much?

Plus this may be a bit dumb to ask but is there any simple way of telling whether a hit is a false positive? In my own experience I have very few if any notifications that I have been attacked?

Just out of interest too I found this site - reasonably informative SecTechno Information Security Blog

The false positives were seen with the trial versions of several programs over the years as a selling gimic! "You have an infection, buy full version now to see... blah blah blah bogus!" When going to run a full sweep with different not just one program afterwards no bugs were to be found!

The blog there points out another interesting vulnerability now being seen for hand held cell phone, smart phone type devices offering connect to email and FaceBook options. The recent trend for all the new thrills and social networks has opened up new doors for exploitations!

Yeah Night Hawk I ws just reading on some sites the Blackberries - whatever being attacked from all sides by the look of things.

My only experience was with Spy Sweeper. It caused all kinds of issues, so Webroot wasn't a likely choice for me. A Guy

Yup, I had Spysweeper and one of the updates converted it to Webroot Security which is a whole security suite. Of course it conflicted with Norton.

I have read that most all suites are using the internet (cloud) in system scans to have up to the minute definitions.

With the av here the new definitions are seen just about every 2hrs. and are applied on the spot. That's part of the real time protection the updated versions of most security programs are seeing at this point.

When looking for a new program at this time the thing to look at would be a program that combines protections rolled up into one suite with an active shield around the registry. The premium versions of many will also include a working firewall.

For an internet security suite that should include web filtering as well as be able to contain any bugs on the spot rather then just indicate a malware is running loose on the system. With too many older programs the bug would be running wild and not even seen until you ran a scan and then were forced to manually remove what some program uncovered.

For most of the better softwares there's a large contrast between the then and the now.