norton antivirus

[jt8971998]

does anyone know if running 2 antiviruses at the same time will cause problems downloading?...i run norton and i also have windows firewall goin at the same time....should i turn the windows one off?

[kluelos]

If you're running Norton Security Suite, then yes, you're running two firewalls, and that's not a good idea. An article in ZDNet Australia a couple of days ago noticed that most virus writers are now testing their wares against Norton AV, since it's the best seller, and against McAfee and Trend, who are the big three. They found that 80% of malware can get past these, is written deliberately to get past them and not released until it can.

That makes Norton a really bad choice all around. Everything it does, something else that's free does better. So your best move is not to disable XP's firewall, but to uninstall Norton and replace it.

[caf4926]

some good advice already given

its the same story with the windows OS, almost all the bad stuff is targeted at windows, because 90% of pc's run it and there appears to be no option otherwise, and anything like nOrton that very often comes bundled in a new pc and so is almost epidemic in its use, is going to come under the same fire, but you do have a choice here, so make a wise one. Dump nOrton.

If you have a router firewall corectly configured you will be fine with just the xp firewall enabled, (although personally, when using windows, I use Kerio).

Anti-virus: Big choice, but AVG Free is pretty good: http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1

or Avast Personal, also free for home use: http://www.filehippo.com/download_avast_antivirus/

[Dark_Shroud]

Avast scored better than AVG in recent tests so you should go with that one.

Since the XP Firewall doesn't block outgoing I leave it one with McAfee personal Firewall and I almost never notice it running. At most XP needs a program to be added to the exception list and thats it. But do not trying running two commerical firewalls together. Thats a very bad thing to do.

I also see a lot of people (tech nerds) running AVG or Avast with Norton or McAfee on their computers as a back up just in case something takes out Norton or McAfee. I quit using Norton when I had a worm go right through it and kill it then my system files. I only had one problem with McAfee's virus .dat files being corupted one evening when I started up the computer, I restarted with my up to date boot discs and killed the virus then restarted my computer and reinstalled McAfee anti-virus and everything was fine. That was before I got my Linksys Firewall NAT Router.

[timken]

I strongly recommend NOD32 from ESET, and to always avoid Norton and Mcafee that will only slow down your computer and not protect it , since has already posted it is expected that you have either one of them.

(Corrected link)

Here is a useful link for the curious ones. Look at the May 2006 statistics

[Dark_Shroud]

Your link is dead.

NOD32 is known for conflicts with p2p programs.

I am able to run McAfee on a P233mhz computer with 288mb of ram with XP SP-2 as the OS and still not use all of the processor power. McAfee Anti-virus & Firewall does not slow down computers, unless a virus scan is running. Try this programs www.ccleaner.com to "speed" things up.