[X4U] Boot Camp success - now, where to get my armor

[Stroller]

On 10 Apr 2006, at 04:30, Philip J Robar wrote:
>> ...
>> AVG is free for personal, non-commercial use: http:// 
>> free.grisoft.com/doc/1
>>
>> The commercial version is still a bargain at $40 for 2 years. It  
>> beats the pants off Norton & McArfy.
>> http://www.grisoft.com/doc/Purchase/lng/us/tpl/tpl01
>
> Not according to PC World. In the current  issue McAffe was rated  
> #2, behind BitDefender, Norton was #5. The three free programs,  
> AntiVir, Avast,  and AVG came in 7th, 8th, and 10th out of 10  
> respectively.

I will, of course, bite.

This is not my experience. I advertise my services as a "PC plumber"  
to home users & small business and I regularly uninstall Norton or  
McAfee and find that AVG finds infected files that these others have  
missed.

My biggest gripe with McAfee & Norton is perhaps that they tend to  
install a full "suite" of security components, such as spam & web  
filters, firewall &c. This would seem to be an "added value"  
proposition to their customers but the result is a number of  
additional programs & services initiated at start-up and running all  
the time in the background, slowing the peecee down. If you have one  
of these programs installed on your PC and run "Hijack This" on it  
you will see at least half a dozen entries associated it - look for  
entries with Norton / Symantec / McAfee in the full path, or .exe  
files whose name begins with "mca" (I can't recall what naming  
convention Norton / Symantec use but it's similar).

Frequently I uninstall Norton / McAfee and find that the machine runs  
significantly faster having done so.

I have to admit that short of buying Outlook 2003 I haven't found a  
spam filter that works as well and is as well integrated as Norton /  
McAfee, but that may be because I'm not trying the $20 - $40  
solutions. As for their firewalls, I feel that XP's own firewall is  
adequate enough and that the substantial "benefit" provided by  
Norton / McAfee is that they'll pop up "alerts" when a new program  
tries to access the internet or you get port-scanned; this may be  
reassuring for some users, however it doesn't really have much  
benefit as  executables of PeeCee programs may be installed most  
anywhere on the system and may not be recognisable from their  
filename. When you are asked whether to allow or deny access to the  
internet for "aolsrvc.exe", how do you know whether is a component of  
your chat program or a virus?

I tend to find these firewalls cause more problems than they fix, and  
the most common cause of "my wireless laptop is no longer printing to  
the machine in my study" is the installation of (a new version of)  
Norton or McAfee.

AVG does only anti-virus, and in my experience it does it well.

> The biggest weakness of the free programs is that their heuristics  
> for dealing with unknowns are weak.

This tends to suggest that "you get what you pay for" however IMO  
this is a slightly fallacious argument in this case.

There is no doubt at all that Norton & McAfee both spend significant  
portions of their revenue on marketing and on putting glossy boxes on  
shelves, whereas Grisoft concentrate on sales via internet download  
and get free publicity for their business sales by giving away their  
free home edition. I would guess that to a very large extent these  
factors balance out.

Grisoft is not some under-funded volunteer organisation without  
resources to develop their software, and last year received  
significant investment funding from Intel.

ClamAV _is_ Free software released under the GPL (and would seem to  
be written by volunteers) yet I'm sure I've read reports that  
disagree with your statement quoted above (suggesting that it is  
better than any other at the heuristics of unknowns).

A final significant factor for me is that home users tend to be lazy  
about renewing their subscriptions for the pay anti-virus services.  
As we all know an anti-virus program without updates is a chocolate  
fireguard, so free anti-virus ensures that the user will never get  
caught out thinking "I'll get round to renewing that subscription  
after payday next month".

Stroller.