[Ham-Computers] McaFee versus Norton plus extras.

[WA5CAB at cs.com]

Comcast recently bought out Warner Cable in the Houston area and our cable 
connection is now Comcast.  They offer (free) McaFee's Security suite which 
supposedly includes firewall, antivirus and antispyware.  I know all the usual 
TANSTAAFL comments about freebies but it isn't actually free as we pay a higher 
than average access fee and it's about to go up.  So forget all comments on 
that subject.

My question is does anyone have any recent hard experience using a McaFee 
firewall, antivirus, and/or anti-spyware program?  And can you compare its 
effectiveness to Norton 2005 and SpyWare Doctor 5.1?  Which are what we are 
currently using.  The Norton product is up for renewal in about a week.  The SpyWare 
Doctor product has some months to run but it is a definite memory hog (has 
leaks), requiring at least twice weekly reboots of two of our machines and weekly 
reboots of the third (two machines are maxed out at 1 GB RAM).

We also run Norton Ghost on one machine.  Any comments on the McaFee 
equivalent would also be appreciated.

We've run Norton since Peter was a pup but at $50.00 per machine versus $0.00 
per machine, I thought it worth looking into.  Plus Norton's dropping of 
support for machines running Windows 2000 pissed me off.

Robert Downs - Houston
<http://www.wa5cab.com> (Web Store)
MVPA 9480
<wa5cab at cs.com> (Primary email)
<wa5cab at comcast.net> (Backup email)