[Ham-Computers] RE: McaFee versus Norton plus extras.

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

You'll probably get a lot of positive and negative responses about both products.  Both are good, neither are perfect.  Both companies are considered "top tier" anti-virus companies.  The McAfee "suite" is integrated, so that can be considered a "plus".  I've also used Symantec Norton products for many years, but most of their current products are over-simplified and "bloated", IMHO.

The best "bang-for-the-buck" these days is the free AVG product(s) from Grisoft.  The "paid" version comes with 2-years of updates as opposed to most other commercial vendors.  Haven't tried their anti-spyware product yet, but it's the old Ewido suite, if you're familiar with it.

Anyways, go with what you think would be best for your system.  There truly isn't a "best" product in these categories - use whatever works best on your system - but stick with a "major" vendor.

How's that for a unanswered answer?  =P

73,

  - Aaron, NN6O

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 10:43 PM
Subject: [Ham-Computers] McaFee versus Norton plus extras.

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
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