5punk

i know its probably been done before but which virus scanner is teh best according to 5punk?

Err, I think you forgot Symantec (which in my experience is site licensed by a lot of businesses and universities). It's also rather good, and it's what I use.

edit: pffft at ninja poll editing.

A poll wasn't the best Idea for this thread, I recommend using Avast, AVG free, A Squared for scanning, Sophos, Symantec and non-free Zone Alarm

EDIT* I use Avast! because it plays nice with x64 and is generally good at what it does.

AVG is not even close to the best, it's just free.

I generally use simiantech, It's not the best IMO/E but I like it because it's not at all invasive under most situations (unless it sees a nasty) and never wants a reboot

Otherwise, I like Sophos and Kaspersky, both are very good, but fail a little by not being free.

Kaspersky is also a little too noisy for my liking, it needs reboots here and there, which is very inconvenient.


edit:

In the past I've tried AVG and panda. both were utter shite.

Out of those I've heard the best things about NOD. I use Avast though, purely for the piratical connections.

Didn't Symantec buy Norton?

Norton was all of teh fail, we had massive outbreaks at work from people who were only using that. Someone took the view that "Market Leader"=Best and we were stuck with it for a while, but we mainly use Kaspersky now, which we'd used since the Win 3.x days.

I've never liked either much, mostly from a memory footprint perspective. Avast was okay, if a little hard on slower machines until I tried to use NZB-o-matic - then it utterly failed as it couldn't monitor all the TCP connections and shut them down.

Might try NOD as people have said good things, I currently use AVG and recommend it generally, but it does miss a few - after an update its scans usually find something "new" in a browser cache or temp file.

FatherJack wrote:Didn't Symantec buy Norton?

Yes, they did.

The Symantec-branded product is the fancier one (that most importantly, doesn't need a subscription to download updates) - it's the new and improved version of the corporate edition of NAV, I believe.

The Norton-branded product is the home user one. It is indeed utterly fail. We shall not speak of it ever again.

I've recently dropped McAfee because I picked up a virus several months ago and by the time I got round to doing something about it McAfee still hadn't picked it up, despite several complete scans. I switched to NOD32 on CheesaAndHam's advice and it picked it up and removed it right away. I still have time left on my McAfee subscription, but I've completely lost faith in it.