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 Originally Posted by NightGizmo
This advice would have been accurate a few years ago, but now it's flipped. Mcafee is crap, Norton is great. Mcafee will slow down your computer considerably, sometimes making it unusable. I stopped using it earlier this year. My brother is still using it (his subscription runs out in a month and he's switching) and the weekly scans cripple his computer for over 36 hours -- ridiculous. My wife still runs it at work -- just last week she got a mass email from Mcafee saying "Oops, we accidentally pushed out an update that broke some people's networking and you might need to do some stuff to fix it."
Norton has become one of the best again -- I have it installed and I don't even notice it.
You are right my experience with those is from a few years ago. Bought a laptop with norton pre-installed, it was so annoying I tried to get rid of it but in doing so it broke my laptop's ability to use the internet and I had to format and reinstall a bootleg windows. Nowadays I just use AVG and rely on the standard windows stuff. General security on the internet has also greatly improved which makes it harder to get infected.
But whichever virus scanner you use, there's no substitute for being careful. Virus scanners look for generic things that virusses share, but for a large part they try to find the exact pattern of known virusses. I know a guy that writes virusses, and he showed me a previously known virus which all the scanners could detect, where he just changed one line of code (having no effect on the functionality) and no virus scanner could detect it anymore.
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