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

[wf2u at starband.net]

Robert and Aaron,

As an IT professional myself, and a long time "corporate" i.e. network and
individual user/installer/administrator of Norton AV, I got a bit annoyed
with it the last few years, as they - as Aaron put it - "bloated" and more
problem prone than before they got so "bloated", in addition to being
costly.
I was never completely satisfied with some aspects of McAfee. My latest
favorite and I recommend it to all my private small business customers, is
the Grisoft product. It's absolutely problem free, installs with no
problems, centralized management is easy. (I'm talking about the corporate
product). Indeed, the subscription is more cost effective than Norton, as
it is for 2 years for around the same price. For individuals I always
recommend Grisoft lately, with their choice whether they want the free AV
or to buy the product (for support). However, I never needed vendor
support for AVG loke for the other "big name" products...

My 2 cents' worth...

73, Meir WF2U
Landrum, SC

> 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
> <http://www.wa5cab.com> (Web Store)
> MVPA 9480
> <wa5cab at cs.com> (Primary email)
> <wa5cab at comcast.net> (Backup email)
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> Ham-Computers mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/ham-computers
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.html
> Post: mailto:Ham-Computers at mailman.qth.net