Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Macaffe up for renewal...Time for a change?

Protection is an interesting subject and it all depends about what you are trying to protect against and the risk of attack.

A commercial organisation will seperate its firewalls from the PC and will no doubt have web filtering in between. This is because they will have more things to protect against than the home user and they'll have more users that can do silly things that could compromise them or introduce viruses and/or malware.

If you keep your PC regulary updated with patches, don't visit dodgy sites and turn on a firewall you'll be less at risk. However, if you regulary download exe files off Limeware and visit said sites, you'll probably want more protection such as website/browser checking.

The free AV stuff is great, if you don't want or need the advanced features that come with most commercial programs.

Typically, the more your computer has to "check" the more resources it will use. There are ways to fine tune AV programs to ensure they work best with your PC and what you do on it. One of the common options is to only scan disk write operations than just reads. There are numerous articles on the internet to help you get the best balance between protection and PC performance for whichever product you choose to use.

The free Microsoft stuff, if that be Security Essentials or their own internal firewall aint bad and should suit most users. Those who want more protection can simply use another product or disable it altogether. It is best practise to seperate the firewall from the PC as if the PC does get infected it can't disable the internal firewall to open ports etc., but this is typically OTT for home use.

If you do get infected I would recommend trying the BartPE method in my earlier post as it's completly free to download the McAffee DAT and boot your comp off CD.

I changed from ESS to F-Secure IS 2010 after 8 years of using the former back in December iirc, when v4 of ESS became totally unstable and started handshank my CPU. This happened to all the computers I installed it on and again a few months later, was not prepared to keep running v3 because they could not be bothered to fix the problems in v4, so will not give them another chance on v4.

F-Secure IS 2010 has proven every bit as good as ESS, in fact from my hackers point-of-view (im not ashamed to admit it, its something I need to know how to do to assist protecting my clients data and systems - the best way to avoid being comprimised is being able to understand how do the comprimising imho), the firewall is the best software one I have come across, it makes the computer pretty much undetectable to the outside world if you tell it to, and the package has dealt with every vulnerability myself and fellow hackers have thrown at it, as one would expect.

Anyone who has had the pleasure to use any of my computers will understand that I find lag of any nature, on any spec system, to be unacceptable, and im pleased to say F-Secure has not had any adverse impact on any machine I am running it on (from C2d's to my age-old Pentium 3 server) - it does not interfere and the firewall is extremely intelligent, ive seen only 3 prompts for application permissions.

The only downside is the basic and somewhat outdated interfece, but I always prefer performance over asthetics - hence I still run Winamp 2.22 lol - I want applications that do the job I need them to without any fuss or bloat, something that looks nice but does not do the job is hardly practical.

£20 for a 3-pc license or £10 for a single user license (OEM) isnt breaking the bank, can't really see all these tight-arses and stingebags keep plodding on with free basic products.

Its a shame ESS has gone kaput, it was always known within the IT industry as the benchmark all-rounder, especially with regards performance and un-interuption, there is nothing worse than having an AV rule your life or bloat your computer.

As for McAffee... would not touch that heap of shit with bargepole, its neither secure or the best in any element of protection, and to say it wanks the host system's resources, is an understatement. There are many millicious virus's out there that pose less of a risk and have less of an adverse impact on system performance than McAffee.

I'd be the first to admit that we have more problems with McCrapee than the viruses themselves, GroupShield periodically kills Exchange databases, dodgy dats frequently whipe out half our network and as for HIPS, that is the biggest bag of shit I've ever seen.

Users pissed that their computers run like crap, slow logons; all have their routes with McCrapee.

And as for EPO, whoever wrote that must have been taking PCP. I've never met a product that needs so much attention.

We have got sophos on our it network. It seems really good, nice management console and it works on apple mac. Very good performance