Antivirus recommendations please

Free : AVG and ZoneAlarm
Paid : Nod32 (antivirus) seems to get praised a lot.

Kaled.

I like AVAST . It is free for home use and very good.

Instead of ZA you might also look at agnitum outpost.

NOD32 is my AV of choice for Windows. I read that NOD32 was the preferred AV of many on the Windows 2000 development team as well. I've never had an issue with it and it runs so quietly and unobtrusively in the background I hardly know it's there.

On the free side AVG gets a lot of good press. I use it on a few lesser machines and can't see that it's been problematic.

I was looking for an SSL certificate yesterday and while browsing the Comodo site I noticed they have several free products available including AV and Firewall. Anyone tried them out?

i've used avg an zonealarm happily for a while

For firewall though, you should consider a hardware firewall, i stopped using zonealarm because it sometimes blocked processes i didn't want blocked

i found it annoying to run my iis devwelopment test bed on a machine also running a software fire wall,

i'm all for hardware firewalls now

Thanks guys. I will look at each. Seems a bit like Concord. I think esure was the best ever and they discontinued it. Everything else is catching up, slowly :-(

You might also check out Comodo

-Corey

I get McAfee "free" with my DSL account that's partnered with MSN.

I used Sunbelt Kerio before that - it can be used for free.

I and many others can get McAfee "free" with softice/frogsice and/or wdasm etc..:) and about 90 seconds on an old box looking for jumps ..same goes for kerio ..norton , panda and all the other stuff that comes ready installed when you buy a box with doze anything pre fitted in the factory ..cost them about 2 to 5 dollars to fit ..so what do you expect?!

NOD 32 is worth your investment ( not because it's the best ..but for under $1000.oo per machine it is ..unless you want to spend time delving into the places where people cant write the letter E the right way around and ascii art :) )..and or a regmon and a worm hook ..and zone alarm or bitdefender kept upto date should keep you safe ( depending on where you go and what you look at..and what you put in the drinks tray and what you click on and and what you let plug into your box(s)inputs ) ..after that it more or less depends on how much silly money you want to spend and/or how much time you want to spend in the wild sacrificing boxes whilst you learn ..

learning isn't a bad thing though ..nor is curiosity ..but if it's not for you ..then the following still holds good ..

if most people only went to sites that they would let their kids visit ..and never clicked on open this file when they were on the net ..and never used outlook nor IE ..and never put other peoples CD's or DVD complilations nor memory sticks nor plug in HD's etc into their machines ..and never tried to buy OEM from those nice people in the mails ..and never ever ever used P2P..

they'd never catch much ..'cept from Sony et al :)

[edited by: Leosghost at 12:14 am (utc) on Dec. 29, 2006]

Don't overlook Leosghost's suggestion for a registry monitoring software (or two). That tip has saved my bacon on more than one occassion.

Here are two free programs that should be in all of your toolkits:

• StartupMonitor [mlin.net] - check when something adds a startup program
  
• RegistryProt [diamondcs.com.au] - realtime registry monitor