Korean Job Discussion Forums

[icnelly]

I bought my comp. in 2005 sometime, and yes it's old, but it's still got enough to keep me till I go home (1 gig ram, 120gb HD, and Pentium 4 2.8ghz), BUT I made the mistake of buying Norton Antivirus in 07/08 sometime (too long ago to remember), and I hate the nagware approach, and Norton's constant bullshit; is there a good antivirus that doesn't try any of that crap?

[blade]

Why pay for Norton Anti Virus when you can get either Avast and AVG for free?

[Chris_Dixon]

so true....norton will slow the hell out of ur comp.

[bassexpander]

The new Norton 360 v2 has had decent reviews, but older versions of the same, or previous Norton products, were raked over the coals for much of what you talked about. I haven't tried Norton 360 v2.

I used Avast for 5 years, and still use it on my office computer. Unfortunately, it's not as good at proactively finding stuff as it used to be. My father got nailed with that fake XPAntiVirus2008 malware thing, and he was running Avast at the time. It also had a habit of letting things get on my computer (although it did find stuff in scans). You can go to Youtube and get free passwords to make Avast Professional run forever, if you want (illegal). The Home version is free, anyway.

I've tried multiple AV applications in several months. At the moment, I'm happy with a trial of Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. It's been doing well. My only big criticism is that the firewall is a bit difficult to figure out. Even still, it's a fairly automatic program.

Here are some others, and what I found after trying them in the last few months:

BitDefender: Can't handle some Korean web pages, and errors with them cause the program to shut itself off. Not nice.

AVG: Didn't fare well in independent tests.

Avira: Top-rated, but gave me blue-screens (probably conflicted with some program I had) and cost is extremely expensive.

Nod32: Works great, and light on resources, but doesn't clean things well once it finds something. Also expensive.


For me (so far) Kaspersky just plain works well. It's usually ranked at or near the top. If you want to purchase it, you can buy it for as low as $30.00 for 3 OEM licenses (don't ever buy directly from their site, where it costs $60 for 1 licenese).

[bassexpander]

Trial of Kaspersky here:

http://www.kaspersky.com/productupdates

You can choose Internet Security 2009, or the non-firewall Antivirus version. If you download from this page, you can avoid the crap of getting authorization to do a free 1-month trial. It says, "for existing customers only" but that isn't checked-for.


Note: Not sure if this still works, but I got 6 months free from here. You'll probably have to spoof your IP address, as mentioned how-to:

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/11/28/instantly-get-a-free-6-months-kaspersky-anti-virus-2009-license-key-by-yuvayantra/

You can update to newer versions after you download, if needed.

[icnelly]

That's what I was looking for, thanks Bass!

[I_Am_The_Kiwi]

Bit Defender Total Security - best there is hands down






.......who really surfs Korean websites anyway.

[pkang0202]

The newest Norton has gotten rave reviews. They say the peformance is a stark improvement of the past versions.

[icnelly]

[bassexpander]

You'll be OK with Avast. If you get the professional version (see youtube for key -- ha), and you can figure out the horrible advanced interface for it, you can set it schedule scans. Otherwise, just get Home and remember to do scans once a week by yourself. It wasn't as good with spyware, though, unfortunately.

I so wanted BitDefender to work, and I was majorly disappointed because it has lots of cool features. It crapped-out every-other time I visited Daum, which is a pretty major Korean site. I'd look at the bottom tray icon, and it had turned grey (meaning off). It stayed on my computer a full 2 days before I abandoned it as worthless for my needs.

Kaspersky is not too heavy on resources, but can be a bit if you are in the middle of a scan. That doesn't matter to me much, anyway, because a feature about it that I love is that I can set it to do a full scan, then auto shut off when finished. I just do this before I head to work or go to bed. You can also schedule scans, so I schedule a simple one during the week. I've got a single core pentium 4 3.0ghz running it OK. My office computer was a 2.8ghz single core, and it ran well there, too.

[I_Am_The_Kiwi]

bit defender will run fine on your specs....download the free full 30 day trial from their site and find out for yourself.

[chuckster]

[Beeyee]

Avira is pretty good. It sits quietly in the icon tray and I don't notice any performance issues.

[bassexpander]

[bassexpander]