What security setup do you have?

Dieselman said:

OMG....................The amount of samples means nothing in the real world but to experience users like us it does. Missed malware is missed malware. Add up all of MRG's tests and that proves my point. Wether its 20 samples or 20,000 samples. A failure is a failure.

Well, according to your first chart, seems you would be using Immunet Protect plus...as it's the ONLY product that doesn't have at least 1 failed. None of these products are perfect. MSE is not absolutely the best product hands down..but it's also not stupid to have this product as your AV of choice.

Dieselman said:

Plus MSE is very ram hungry.

Never experienced that. What do you consider to be very ram hungry? I'm going to look at my Windows 7 box and see exactly what is being consumed by MSE 2 right now. Will post back

My MSE is taking about 60MB total at the present time. I've got 8GB of RAM,and 6.6GB is available. So, I'm not too concerned.

Unfortunately, average users make poor decisions and don't really know what they are doing. They pirate software like photoshop and search for all kinds of stuff online that gets them into trouble. No amount of software protection can protect them sufficiently from themselves.

Dieselman said:

pparks1 said:

My MSE is taking about 60MB total at the present time. I've got 8GB of RAM,and 6.6GB is available. So, I'm not too concerned.

When looking at a product you need to look outside the box. Stop thinking just about your pc and think about the average user. Heck I still see pc's with 512Mb of ram. Even with 1GB of ram MSE sucks it dry.

60MB of RAM is 'way too much' for an AV? How lightweight does the AV need to be? I think most peoples email clients, browser of choice, heck even a movie or music player can consume that amount of RAM. I mean, my firefox is currently sucking up about 180MB at the present time with 5 tabs open.

You guys are fighting over a red herring. There are about a dozen fine AV programs free and paid. If you you know what you are doing on the web, they all suffice.

I personally prefer NIS 2011, but I also have a couple of my wife's systems running with MSE. But she only uses AOL and safe sites.

I think the best "protection" is frequent imaging. Then you can always bail yourself out of a tight spot - virus or other.

The other thing to consider with AV's, on top of memory usage, is also the amount of time added to the machine startup, the amount of CPU time that it uses when it's running realtime or scanning, and the amount of time that scans take.

I don't consider this thread "arguing", it's just friendly banter between computer nerds.

This PDF suggests that NIS 2010 has 2 active processes and the 1st usually consumes 5-130MB of RAM depending upon what it's doing and the 2nd takes between 5-45MB. So, I'm not sure that 20MB is the constant usage for all people;
http://technoledge.com.au/pdfs/inter...curity2010.pdf

I think NIS 2011 is a fairly decent product...but it's just had so many bad years, that I cannot bring myself to paying Symantec for it.

whs said:

I think the best "protection" is frequent imaging. Then you can always bail yourself out of a tight spot - virus or other.

It's certainly a solid layer of protection. Of course, if the virus/malware manages to infect another machine on your network, or heaven forbid compromise your identity....that image might not always bail you out of your tight spot.

Ok, look....everyone is going to have their own opinion, and everyone is going to defend their choice. That's fine. No one is better than the rest, otherwise everyone would be using the same thing.
I've used many through the years, but at this point, I can't put down MSE since it hasn't given me a reason to. I've used it since it was first released, and it's on 2 pc's and a laptop. It's light enough on resources, doesn't nag, and I haven't had a single problem since I started using it.

I'm not going to sit here and switch AV's every week based on some "test". It's ever changing, and i'm not going to knock anyone who uses other AV's. More of it is common sense and using your head when doing things that will keep you out of trouble more than a particular AV.

It's really not any different than the argument about browsers on security, speed, how they look. If you like it and it does what you need it to do, then use it. So many people base their browser choice on speed, when it's in milliseconds on a test, but unnoticeable in real world use. What's the point...you'd be changing your browser every damn time some new version of one comes out that 's slightly faster than the one you're using.

Maybe I shouldn't have got this laptop because it's not top of the line, cutting edge, and the best one out there. It wouldn't finish high on any "benchmark" tests, but since it does what I want it to do, that's what matters to me. Same with an AV, and a browser, and pretty much all the other software I use.


EDIT: not arguing....just an opinion based on use of said AV.