Before I drop further dough on new Anti Virus Software this January I am conducting a little research and trying out various products.  I’ll post my experiences here, perhaps I can assist others or get some feedback as well.

McAffee

I hate it.  I won’t ever use it.  I think of it as a virus in itself.  It’s intrusive, eats ram, annoying as hell, and you can’t get the damn thing uninstalled from your system by simply going to the remove program portion of your control panel.  Not to mention I’ve seen quite a few viruses get past it.  I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Norton

I’ve used Norton for years.  For the most part I’m happy with it.  I prefer the internet security suite version, as it comes with a better firewall than the built in Windows firewall.  There are some minor things that annoy me but I suspect that there will be some of that in every application.  My biggest complaint with Norton is the cost.  For years, a yearly subscription for updating was only $20.00.  Now you essentially have to by all new software each year for 60 bones + tax. You generally get 3 pc’s per license…my household has 5 computers so you can see why cost is an issue.  So my subscription came up last month and I thought it would be a good time to do some homework.

BitDefender

I installed the 30 day trial to check it out.  For the most part it was good….it picked up a bug that Norton didn’t right off the bat.  I liked how you could easily access all the settings and all of the customizing options are great.  Some of the icons and interface are kind of ugly - and by ugly I mean some kind off odd image distorion.  I’ve only used it on my laptop with Vista.  It’s also about 10 bucks cheaper than Norton and you get 5 PC’s with 1 license.  So far BitDefender is in the lead.

ESET

They had a sexy looking ad in Wired Magazine this month.  For a free 30 day trial simply go to their website and download it. HAHAHA.  Yeah right.  The amount of hell i’ve gone through the past 2 days to even get a free download is not worth the irritation.  So you click the link for the free download.  You fill out a big long form.  Then they send a confirmation email.  I recieved the confirmation email and clicked on the link.  “Congratulations, your email has been verified.  Click here to download your free 30 day trial.”  So you click on it.  “Before you can download the 30 day trial you must enter your username & password.”  What the hell?  I don’t have one.  Double checked the email I eas sent…nothing there…double  checked my spam folder to make sure there wasn’t an additional email sent that may have been filtered out. no.  So I figured I needed to register.  Went through their entire website including FAQ. Nothing.  So now I’m irritated as hell that I had spent an hour trying to download something for free.  That you can’t download until you have a username/password, that you can’t get unless you are an existing customer.  Feeling like I was trapped in an infinite loop I filled out the customer service form.  2 days later, still no response.  If this is any indication about their quality of service…NO THANK YOU.

On to the next one. 

Tomorrow- PANDA Internet Security 2009