Recently while looking for registry information I came across four different message boards in which individual posters believe Norton is a GIANT piece of crap (i.e. it causes errors itself and hurts computers, not that it merely does not catch viruses or malfunctions with the result of not protecting). Obviously any commercial virus scanner is a piece of crap, but these posters believe that Norton will actually mess up your system. However, the one post I checked the date on was from 2005. What is your opinion on this? (Keep in mind this is not my computer, and the guy who owns it wants to use Norton mainly because that's what Dell gave him... ).

In keeping with the topic, I had uninstalled Norton on his other hard drive after it showed no way to fix the "problems" it detected, after which he told me his friend had planned to give him the activation key. The most commonly-toted virus scanner, or so I thought, was AVG. But AVG when I downloaded it has no way to check off and "repair" individual items (while leaving some intact), making it an obvious bad choice. So which virus protector SHOULD be used? I used to use Ad-Aware but that's been a bigger-then-original memory hog for a long time now.

More import of the two issues for me at the moment is the Norton question, because it takes up 89 MB and this is a 30G hard drive.

My experience with Norton is that it's slow and not really worth it. I ran it for a few months before I decided to remove it from my computer. I wouldn't go as far as claiming that it messes up computers, however. I personally use AVG as the "less worse" solution, but it's by no means perfect either.

If you're looking for an alternative, you might want to check out Comodo Antivirus. It's what we use at work, and I'm satisfied with the way it runs. There's a free version available, too.

Also, please note that Ad-Aware is NOT an anti-virus. It targets spyware only, not viruses or worms. It has it's uses, but it should complement an anti-virus and not simply replace it.

Forgot about it because I've never seen it used, due to the fact that it doesn't come with anything. My dad is the only one who pays for it, and he uses McAfee. Although it (Kaspersky) is $59.95, I can't imagine why you would pay for that when there ARE free (decent) scanners available.



That's fairly obvious, but I was wondering specifically about the computer damage because the computer owner is semi-obsessed with it (an extremely unknowledgeable guy who thinks he isn't... pretty sure the mess up was due to him using a "registry cleaner"), and because the hard drive was a temporary one... if that doesn't make sense or conflicts with my first post please excuse me, I have no concentration right now.

AVG might do it's job technically, but I don't like anything that has no options (unless it's a tiny utility or similar)... in fact it installed several other programs from the same brand without permission as well.

Thanks for the help, guys.

(But please feel free to keep inputting if you haven't seen this topic yet :P.)

Edited by God on March 8, 2010 at 16:28:50.

Edited by God on June 14, 2010 at 11:20:18.

Exactly what I was thinking. My guess is that that's better then Norton/McAfee/etc. crap but not as good as the ones intelligent non-IE users usually recommend. However, I can't imagine Microsoft making anything that isn't a huge computer-freezing memory hog. Even it's "miniature" tools, like the defragger and System Info, this applies to.



Hasn't bothered it yet, the problem is the "Sandbox" not working so I have to shut it off after allowing the program through, then re-doing it later with only one user logged on also. Incidentally the sandbox is the one part of a program that SHOULD work properly, since theoretically you don't need anything else.

I still don't like AVG. Maybe it got nuked in an update.