Best antivirus I think is Clam AV

 

Clam is the best for X. But not all of us run an X-Unit... What version have you got?

 

IF you want to opt out of those targeted ads that put a trcking cookie on your comp.
and track what sites you go to and put up the ads based on what sites you visit.
It isn't all the companies that do it but it is quite a few, You will still see ads but they
won't be catered to you. It creeps me out when I see ads that seem like they know
exactly who I am!! http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

 

Yeah, virus and spyware protection can get to be a multi layer approach.

I use Adaware, Spybot Search and Destroy, SpywareBlaster and WInpatrol along with Norton System Works. My kids go to music sites and teenage kid type sites and spyware and viruses are thick as fleas there. So far all our PCs have been pretty well protected, but occasionally a new program sneaks in, so update frequently.

I am pretty happy with Adaware and Search and Destroy. But their latest versions do appear less user friendly. They require more user thinking to resolve problems and S&D now asks far more questions of "Found blah blah.." I liked the previous versions of both better. Still these two catch a lot of spyware, especially if you are testing a system that has never had anti spyware software.

SpyBlaster doesn't really tell you anything so you don't know if it is good or bad, but back when I started using it, it was rated highly.

WinPatrol is pretty good and allows you an option to dig thru your system manually where you can finds lots of intersting information and problems and then kill them. Automatically it also does a good job, BUT, the latest versions of Norton do not seem to like this program running. So I no longer have it as a startup program. Now I use it manually and like I said it is very good for showing you what programs are running and hidden files etc, and then helping kill bad ones.

Norton is becoming a mixed blessing. Every year at renewal time I consider chucking the whole thing and using something else. Biggest problems are Norton is so huge and busy, that it slows down the PC noticably. And almost every time it comes to renewal, the update crashes the system or goes into outerspace and then I have to reload. I find just waiting for a Free rebate offer and buying and installing the whole program is sometimes less headache than renewing over the web. But Norton does catch a lot of problems for me. I do like Go-Back since it seems to work better than system restore, but it is a disk hog and slows things down.

Just my experience.

Jim Henderson

 

Hey Jim, if you completely remove Internet Explorer from your PC and replace it with FireFox or Opera or Safari, you will eliminate alot of the problems that sneak in the back door. IE is riddled with back doors, flaws, error, and is easily exploited.

Removing Norton is easier said than done, Norton embeds itself so deeply into your OS, that a full system wipe is the quickest way to remove that "virus".

For a Firewall (if that is why you have Norton), then lose the software. Software firewalls are only as good as the person that set it up (or disable it) get yourself a router, routers out of the box are an instant hardware firewall, a router is a heck of alot harder to bypass than software is. for every patch you download for your Software firewall, there are a 1000 hackers out there that have already found a way around it. It is a hell of alot harder to hack hardware.

They say Kids can be tough......


....However if you boil them first, they're not bad.