Today I was sitting at my day job and I received notification that they were switching from Trend Micro to Norton. I thought to myself…thats interesting because that’s like going from the fire back to the frying pan. Norton for companies is a lot less bloated than the home version but there are still better solutions out there. Near the bottom of this notice there was a segment that we no longer get Trend Micro for free for home. It’s no secret that i’m not a fan of Trend Micro so I considered that to be a good thing. Anyway at the bottom of this e-mail was 2 links to 2 pretty popular PC magazines with articles on anti-viruses to help us choose an alternative.
So I view these articles and my response is this:
IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT PLEASE DO NOT WRITE TO THE WORLD ABOUT IT!
One of the articles gave the #1 spot to an antivirus that had worse detection but a nicer looking interface. I am not making this up! If you read an anti-virus review that gave a higher score to an inferior product because of a nicer interface please post a nasty comment for me!
The other article had tests being done where it showed several products scoring 100% in detection. If you do a test and even one anti-virus gets 100% then you need a better test. If you do a test and several antivirus products get 100% then you just need to step aside and let someone that knows what they are doing do the tests themselves because you obviously don’t have a clue. Another thing that the second article was guilty of was giving high scores to products I know bog down your system BIG TIME. I don’t care how good it is at stopping viruses, if it slows down the user its garbage!
My personal favorite Antivirus is Avira. It doesn’t have a nice interface but its detection is consistently top notch. Avira’s removal process isn’t as good as some other anti-viruses but for most advance users just being told there’s an infected file is all they need. For antimalware I like Malware Bytes because they have Merijn Bellekom….enough said.