[raymondlin]

After installing all my software and games back on, I got the chance to download a Antivirus checker & firewall tonight. I went for AVG & Kerio in the end, compare to Norton & Mcafee virus checker, AVG is much better, less system intensive and I can disable it from the system tray. can't seem do that with Mcafee.

As for Kerio, it was either this or ZoneAlarm, went for Kerio because I've read people having problems with it quite often. The question is that have I made th eright choice? Both program seems to be light on system resource (good thing, important thing- CPU usage is at 0-2% while I am typing this with 32 processes running in XP !)

What would you have gone for? or I should have downloaded?

 

[Ctn]

Go for mcafee. All its annoying features can be disabled in the registry.

Winroute is an awesome firewall *cough* router *cough*.

 

[Zanth]

FreeBSD or Linux.

 

[Duncan]

Quote:

Originally posted by raymondlin Both program seems to be light on system resource (good thing, important thing- CPU usage is at 0-2% while I am typing this with 32 processes running in XP !)

Using Norton AV & Firewall right now, i'm running at between 2 and 7% CPU usage with 36 processes (commit charge 185m/2018m)...

I personally hated, yes HATED McAfee firewall... because it kept asking me time and time again if I wanted certain programs (Kazaa & MSN Messenger mainly) to use the internet... and even if you asked it to remember your settings ~ for these two, it still wouldn't...

Norton Firewall is much better in that respect, but the best AV software that I know of is Panda Titanium.. daily virus definition updates, and could find virii that Norton couldn't

 

[grinch]

disclosed are my opinions and they are generally a bit psycho when it comes to computers and especially, tweaking computers:

a) anti-virus software sucks. it's a virus itself, don't install it. i never ever install it and haven't for over.. three years now. it is a horrid loss of system resources and just all round bites. if you're dumb enough to download and execute a virus, you deserve to have the poor performance of a computer and decide to buy a mac instead. DON'T OPEN SKETCHY EXECUTABLES. i can't say it any better than that. also, most big company websites offer free online scans if you ever think that you may have gotten a virus

b) firewalls are overrated. they're great to push to the paranoid consumer, but i find in 90% of day-to-day use they aren't very useful. sure you know if a bad program is connecting to the internet somewhere, but not much beyond that. and if you haven't been opening sketchy executables, you shouldn't have that problem anyway.

i'd probably use tiny personal firewall though. i used tiny products before they came out with that firewall (winroute) and i was always *extremely* impressed by them. i hear this kerio is kinda cool though, haven't looked into it at all though.

just my opinion. for the record, i don't run a firewall right now because i use a bnc to connect to irc and nobody knows my ip there, which is i think where you would pick up any nasties wanting to attack you.