Quote:
Originally Posted by Castout
In defense of Norton
The current Norton IS NOT the old Norton.
I'm using Norton Internet Security myself and it's good and it is light on the resources.
I used to be using Comodo Internet Security but these days their product is not as good as they used to be and I got the impression they have gotten lazy and complacent. Can't blame them though as theirs is a free product so you can't really complain.
Avira is good too I trust that app.
As for 64 bit software there are more things to protect in 64 bit OS. For example some exploits that wouldn't work in 32 bit system would pass a security app detection in 64 bit environment. It's things like these.
Some security app are not even designed for 64 bit environment and wouldn't work in it. Imo a 64 bit security app needs to be designed for 64 bit environment from the development process and not just simply ported.
I used to be unaware of this issue with regard to security apps in 64 bit environment. Needless to say there are now a lot more app that caters to 64 bit environment better [than Comodo Internet Security for 64 bit].
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The general release version of Norton is slow and just a bad idea, like putting a deck gun onto a type XXI. The Endpoint Protection - their corporate AV software has always been light on the resources and excellent (can just be expensive depending on the licensing); an almost 180 of their consumer brand stuff. One nice point with SEP, the license is good forever.
For the free stuff it seems like it changes each month which is best, AVG Avira, and Avast have all passed my own personal tests (when testing software for the company) in catches purposely placed infected files. Avira (imo) worked the best since it did have realtime scanning (on the free version) and would indicate an infected file accessed on a remote drive when browsed to.
Funny you should mention Comodo, after their last series of changes I got the same impression, and ended up 86'ing and just leaving the Windows Firewall (with 2 Hardware Firewalls in place at home I've only managed to get a major infection once so far) and all the filtering to the real firewalls. Its really sad, there's a lot of free software out there that works as good or better than what you could pay $100's of bucks for. It's frustrating to watch the good free ones go from mediocre to great to awful, back to top notch and then slide back down to useless; rinse and repeat.
So far the only programs I've used that have really made use of the x64 architecture are Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (CS5, 64bit versions). They're a lot faster for the work I do on them, and so far the only ones that I've been able to see a major increase in productivity so far based solely on its coding (and not just faster hardware).
If you have a lot of time and your hands to fiddle around with Privoxy is an excellent free ad/spam/malware filtering program. It isn't something you download and install and have running in 10 munutes though, to really get its full capabilities and functionality takes a long amount of time fine tuning each setting. The amount of variable that are configurable is scary, though once working I've found I have never needed to use an additional plug-in for Firefox to remove ads/deal with (flash) cookies or anything security related.