Mcaffee or Norton antivirus?
 

i just recentally obtained both (newest versions out to date) and I was wondering which one to use. I have always used norton, but im also biesed towards norton because Ive never used mcafee before, so I figured id get your guys inputs. what do you guys think?

I wouldn't use either; I use Sophos or Trend

are they free?

I've used Norton for 7 years now on my home PCs with no virus problems.

sophos is free for me as it's what my work uses

From someone who sells four different AV vendors' products, I'd recommend Trend. Or possibly Panda, though they're the company I have the least experience with.

Then again, I have less exposure to "this AV product detected/removed this virus better than that one" than each vendor's support policy and pricing structure. In those terms, Trend and Panda (i believe) are the only ones I sell who have not yet started charging for tech support. Norton and McAfee charge $2.95 a minute. Trend's pricing structure is, I think, the least "greedy". Their product also seems to have fewer problems with software/hardware conflicts than the others, but I'm not sure that's accurate due to the differences in volume I see from that product compared to the other vendors.

I have complaints with Trend that it will expire and not alert the user. I have had this happen with 2 versions of their consumer AV and I find it unacceptable

I ve used Norton ever since I got into computers it has done a great job to... NORTON ALL THE WAY!!

they all do the same job... choose one, if it works then great, if it dont, try the other one

AVG here. Had norton and mcafee for several years. Not anymore.

Norton works for me (only been using anti virus since going from 98 to xp though :mad: )
Tried Mcafee briefly before that, but for some reason had to remove it.

I have no greviences with either as a virus checker... although the copy of McAfee I had would only install if I installed windows in a certain order so that annoyed me enough to change.

i like that fact that norton does progresive scanning which can be especially usefull when using programs such as kazaa. I know some other programs which don't do this as well. Norton always seems to catch the viruses before they even finish... so no complaints with norton from me.

was that really a tough question, if you want mainstream AV you take nortons.
you take mcafee if a gorilla is threatening to rape you.

More like no antivirus at all.

Norton. I have always had problems with Mcafee.

I use "Nightly Backups" as my anti virus. a couple months ago I tried one of them... I think it was Semantic or some such... and it was actually worse than the worst virus I've ever had... oh man.... I had to revert to a previous night backup to get rid of it.... so now every so often, when I start noticing some rather accurate add-banners, or weard hdd activity :D... I just go to one of these online Trojan/worm scanning websites, scan me memory (not the drives, oh no... never do that).

and if all is well I just give spybot a spin or two... fixes it up about 99% of the time...

My highschool used Mcaffee, and I was on the IT team at the time. and I use norton on my personal machines, so I have experience with both.

Norton is far far far better than Mcaffee. The definitions have a tendancy to be updated faster and more frequently on nortan, and nortan is better at finding, isolating and neutrilizing viruses than Mcaffee.

I recomend Norton.

Honestly... I don't think you need to run an AV... I know I'm sorta trollin' the thread.. but I don't understand how you can get a virus. As longas you use some caution.. even then you wont get much... I run housecall from trendmicro every so often just in case

Heh. I wish our campus network was safe enough for me to stick my head in the sand like that. I've had several friends who were actually unable to finish patching a fresh OS install on their machines before being infected. I genuinely don't feel safe without both antiviral and a good firewall up. Being careful might save you from the random email with the NOT_A_VIRUS.exe attachment, but the nasty stuff doesn't require you to be an idiot before it gets you.

And as murphy's law goes, you will get infected at the worst possible time. Twice, I've seen someone get nailed with something nasty enough they couldn't get any work done when a big paper was due the next day. :eek:

I've tried AVG and currently use Avast. It's free, like AVG, but has a cooler interface and automatic updating. I've seen a review in a magazine stating it is a bit faster than AVG, but i couldn't notice any difference.

My campus network is the same. In fact, I've been building machines for clients the last couple of days, and I lost two Windows XP installs that way before I started hiding the "virgin" machine from the network using the second LAN port on my motherboard. Both times the machine was not connected to the network until immediately prior to going on-line to complete the Windows Update procedure... and both times, NAV was "guarding" the system against viruses (it saw them both times, but failed to do anything). Damn frustrating, I'll tell you.

Isn't that the sad truth? I've never had it happen personally, but I have loaned out one of my SETI rigs a couple of times to friends who have been crippled the night before a paper was due.

I used to use norton. It isn't that good its just the most popular. At the moment i'm using AVG but the best to use bitdefender. They have a free version and a pay for version. I gonna switch to bitdefender in a week or so when i have the time.

A lot of the free ones work the same they just dont have the support they all use the same virus definition and there search algorithms are the same.


Buzz

:confused: Sophos is the cheapest worst solution out there.
melissa, code red, and loads of other virusses where blocked by Sophos after 8 weeks!. Those ppl are fast!

My company also uses it, but I have Norton running besides it to keep my laptop virus free :D

My vote for Kapersky av or Nod32, they find everything that norton fails to find and does not drain your pc:s resources, Have tryed Norton for two years, Mcaffee for one, and felt in love for Nod32 and kapersky after that.