AVG VS. NORTON

[kimchi]

I'VE STOPPED RENEWING MY NORTON ANTIVIRUS AND AM USING AVG's FREE EDITION INSTEAD. IS THIS A STUPID THING TO DO?

[yang11]

AVG free version may not clean virus for you. it just qurantine virus. thats all in theory.
GOOD LUCK

[Babe Ruth]

This will save you some money to spend on your other computer purchases. It will certainly do the job of antivirus protection.

[Steve Askew]

No its not stupid
Ihave nortons 2003 that came with my motherboard (never installed it) & I prefer to use AVG

I use AVG & Paradise which has antivirus & spam protection
& also I'm cautious when it comes to opening unknown files or attachments.
Also I keep windows up to date Via Microsoft site.

Cheers steve

[agent]

Many people love AVG more so than Norton Anti-Virus, etc, and no, it's not stupid.

Might I suggest turning capslock off?

[drcspy]

Check out consumer magazine test on antivirus progs

1st Norton
2nd McAfee
3rd AVG

the difference between AVG and Norton was negligable......I am a tech and often come across folks who shudder at paying Symantic quite a bit of $$ for anti virus when there's a free program (AVG) which I am certain does as good a job..............I use it myself and have never caught a virus yet...............of course NO anti virus program is perfect but in my opinion based on experience AVG is FINE.............

[Pheonix]

Agree with drcspy, AVG is much lighter on resources than Nortons and causes less problems with slow down and conflicts. Recommend AVG to anyone.
Norton has a slight edge in that it picks up "in the wild" virus's better and is better at picking up trojans.
But for the average user, I don't think that gives it enough advantage over AVG.
A lot of people go on the tests done over 12 months ago in which AVG didn't go so well. Later reports show a vast improvement. I have about 35 + people on AVG, and none of them have had any problems with un-caught virus's.
Reports are OK, but real-life is the ultimate test. :D

[Susan B]

I am very happy with AVG, it has caught and cleaned quite a few virus infected files for me. :-)

[nadius]

AVG is good, but i believe norton update their virus definitions more frequently.

one time a friends pc with up-to-date AVG got infected whilst on my pc norton detected and quarantined the virus.

nevertheless, its free - so i say stick with it.

[Jester]

My personal experience:

I have used AVG for a few years now and it has caught a number of nasties on my kids' PC and one or two on mine. I installed it on mum's PC a year or so ago and she hasn't been infected since.

A colleague had Nortons, and it was causing problems as far as using system resources and they were getting continual notifications from Xtra and friends that they were sending infected files by email. Nortons didn't pick up anything, due largely to them not updating it regularly I guess, mainly due to costs involved in subscribing.

I used an uninstall program to thoroughly get rid of Nortons and installed AVG. AVG identified and quaranteened several viruses.

AVG updates the definition files regularly. Installing these now is very fast. You can schedule this to occur when you find it convenient. Mine starts at 12.30am each morning if the database is more than 3 days old.

I received a copy of Nortons with a new motherboard, and tried it out, but, to be honest it was too obtrusive for me, and slowed things down too much.

Maybe for those who don't mind many apps running at once and not clued up on what to look for or download and accept every file out there Nortons is a good choice, as long as they keep it updated and don't feel jaded at paying for it once their initial period of use is up. This, I feel is Norton's biggest downfall.

J
:D

[bmason]

I've been using AVG (and installing for many others) for a couple of years and it works great. Recently got a trial copy of nortons and didn't really like it.

Even on my athlon 2100 I noticed the affect on performance when nortons was running, while AVG is not noticeable.

[Winston001]

I guess we all like free stuff. I use Norton, but wouldn't hesitate to use AVG.

However my choice when I get around to it will be NOD32 which is not free but very good.

Having experienced virus problems at work in the past, the cost of protection is well worth while and cheap.

Cheers
Winston001

[Rod ger]

In my opinion its horses for courses. AVG if you have no absolutely vital info on your computer, are aware and practice safe se. urfing, yes surfing, don't give out your email address to every Tom, Dick and Hacker, and generally keep a low profile you will be fine( as long as you update regularly.

On the other hand if you do have invaluable data on your computer, surf with another computer. Otherwise take the resourses & $ hit and go for Nortons and of course still practice safe se etc. etc

Most problems occur because of GULLIBILITY. Checking out attachments and links for unbelievable deals, pictures etc in emails can often lead to unbelievable damage. No antivirus can be TOTALLY up to date all the time,
so using you head is also a pretty good additional protection too.

[beama]

We use AVG pro (free is a disabled version of this ie no advanced interface, no custom scans and no scheduling) and it works fine on all our 98 and NT kernel workstations and I use the free version and recommend it to people as well. Sorry, I will disagree a little with a post here "it just qurantine virus. thats all in theory" yes true but it also heals and when it detects unusual (suspect disk writes) it will stop that action until user has indicated that its ok or given permission for that file to be healed. It is the value of disk write monitoring (which is real time) which is what I like about AVG, Innoculate was the only other free (no longer) virus checker that I knew of that offered this real time monitoring.

[albatross]

Nod NOD.... say no more