My Mom has been using Norton 360 antivirus, but it is ridiculously slow and fucks up her other programs like FireFox 3, Corel Draw, and Adobe Photoshop. She just recently switched to a free antivirus program Avast!, which apparently has "rave reviews".

Anyone familiar with it or know of any better options? I know AVG is a good antivirus but I haven't been in the antivirus/spyware circles at all, since I have nothing on my computer right now other than Firefox w/NoScript and the NCSU Symantec Antivirus...

7/30/2008 2:29:40 PM

yes, it's good, on par with AVG, maybe a bit less popular, but ok
http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/comparatives.html

[Edited on July 30, 2008 at 2:38 PM. Reason : .]

7/30/2008 2:36:38 PM

we used avast at my last job. it was ok i guess, but in general i'm against using antivirus anyways

7/30/2008 2:42:39 PM

i put it on customer PCs, seems to work fine. curious about how much resources it uses but not so curious that i've checked it out

7/30/2008 2:49:02 PM

really lite on resources but slows down internet if you have all the shields on...i have turbo rr and a 2.8 ht p4 with 1gb pc3200.

7/30/2008 4:34:58 PM

Been running Avast! for 4 years, and have had no big deals.

Explorer is a bit slow to start, but no problems otherwise. So's Outlook.

I also run Spybot as a background process.

My system is a lil slower than I would like, but I've been using it for close to 5 years with nothing but a mobo swap (burned up south bridge on a MSI Socket A mobo; replaced with an ASUS which I don't really like).

7/30/2008 5:32:27 PM

i ran SAV corporate 9 and then jumped symantec endpoint protection (10 was just awful) free from the university (although i think they're going to be changing AV vendors soon)

i don't notice any significant memory leaks or system problems

7/30/2008 6:21:55 PM