avg is really great and zone alarm for the firewall is good too

 

Give Avast a try, It's free for the home addition and it has saved my butt twice while on limewire. I dumped Norton and I still had five or six months before I had to purchase new addition. It does a great job, alerted me to several e-mails that were bad. I like it so far. Check it out and give it a try.
http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

 

This one of the best IMO. Been using it since I got my new PC for about 7 months now and it's great.


Dan

 

One of the best I've found is Nod32. Uses very little resources compared to many of the others and hasn't let me down yet. Been using it for years. If you're going to pay for one, I've found it's the best bang for your buck.

 

Just the other day my virus protection ran out and I didn't know what product I was going to continue with. Then I sign on to this site and there it was sitting in the first thread. This site is so awesome, helps you with so many different things it just keeps on amazing me. Thanks for all the info guys.

 

Thanks guys for all of the suggestions. My Norton subscription runs out in 7 days so I am going to give AVG a try.

Rammstein 500 mentioned Zone Alarm for a firewall. If I go with AVG, is the Zone Alarm program still necesary and recommended or will I be ok with just AVG? I have no clue about firewalls.

NHSP-06 - This site is the best. Everyone is here to help.

TC

 

AVG has anti-virus and anti-spyware. Both are FREE on the website.

 

Zone Alarm is a very nice free firewall.

Craz3d you really should use something better than the Windows version.

Nod is a nice option as well and I agree it uses very little resources.

 

my Norton expires in 21 days and i might also switch to AVG. with my Norton, it blocks all ads on all websites. does AVG block ads?

EDIT: Here is link to all kinds of freeware

 

I tried norton, avast, and avira and Avira is what i currently run (www.free-av.com) and i have not had any problems since i put it on and it has caught everything that has tried to install itself. I used to use Zone alarm for my firewall but every time my desktop and my laptop would come off standby it would prevent anything from going online so I would have to shut down and restart zone alarm. I got really tired of that so I just run the windows firewall and avira.

 

Just an FYI. I installed AVG anti-virus and spyware and uninstalled Norton. I ran scans for both. Nothing showed up during the virus scan but a trojan file showed up during the spyware scan (nice job Norton). Cleared everything and am very happy with AVG so far.

Any more comments on firewalls would be appreciated. Vader??

 

I'm currently testing Kaspersky's firewall but so far I wouldn't recommend it. It isn't for the non-IT person. I have heard good things about Comodo http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/ but haven't tested it myself.

I still would recommend ZoneAlarm as the best free version.

 

Get a router if you want a hardware firewall. You'll also then have an easy way to get more computers online and networked.

AVG Anit-spyware is one of the best spyware scanners/cleaners I've found. Spybot is a good one too and it's free. If you just want a quick free online spyware scan Xclean is pretty good. And of course there's AdAware. I usually run all four if I'm cleaning someone's system up. If one misses something then one of the others usually catches it.
One other little gem of a tool is RegProtect. Tiny tiny footprint (128k) but works great for keeping things like spyware out of your Run key.

 

Your typical home hardware router/firewall is important but not enough. They don't typically inspect outbound traffic. I wouldn't depend on that alone unless you've got a nice one.

 

Vader:

If I went with Zone for my firewall, would I have to do anything with the Windows firewall I already have (uninstall or do nothing and load Zone)?

Thanks.

TC