Free antivirus

[SamIAm]

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Free anti-viral software are not as good.

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This statement is unqualified at best, ludicrous at worst.

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I have read a few independent reviews stating otherwise.

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Do you have links? I'd be interested in reading those.

[psionic storm]

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which one of these uses the fewest system resources/doesn't bog down your computer?

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Buy NOD32. Free anti-viral software are not as good.

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This statement is unqualified at best, ludicrous at worst.

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i dont know why people think this opinion seems far fetched. antivirus companies esentially make money off new viruses, is it not reasonable to suspect them as the ones responsible for creating a portion of new viruses (therefore being the first to have definitions for them, making them better)?

[Sotiria]

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which one of these uses the fewest system resources/doesn't bog down your computer?

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Buy NOD32. Free anti-viral software are not as good.

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This statement is unqualified at best, ludicrous at worst.

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i dont know why people think this opinion seems far fetched. antivirus companies esentially make money off new viruses, is it not reasonable to suspect them as the ones responsible for creating a portion of new viruses (therefore being the first to have definitions for them, making them better)?

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It's not far fetched at all, but who cares (and I'm not being flippant towards you or any other posters in this thread)?

The whole "virus protection" software market is a scam anyway. For one, being smart with your browsing habits, running day to day PC tasks in non-administrative/root space, and not having random ports wide open to the internet goes way further in protecting you than any POS virus scan software will.

Zero-day attacks on services that are commonly open on most home/business PC's are extremely rare, plus when you're running a techonology that relies on signatures/checksums for detection purposes, it's likely that a decently written virus can avoid detection/removal.

On that same note, regarding Symantec/Norton/NOD/Kapersky/any other virus scan software you pay for, they don't even detect known "in the wild" virii (I still don't know wtf the plural of virus is) a lot of the time.

So, my professional opinion is that, unless you are a business and you have to, there really is not a good reason to pay for virus scanning software.

[daveT]

So called "independent" reviewers rate Norton as the best. I read one "independent" review that ranked Norton above Zone Alarms because ZA was slightly harder to use, even though it ranked higher than Norton in protection.