Question: In your opinion, which antivirus product is the best?

Rather than answer that question, what I’ll do instead is tell you what we run at the PC Doc HQ and what we used to run and why we don’t run those now.

On our personal machines Kathie and I used to run Norton AntiVirus (we got onto the NAV wave at about 1998 I think) but last year we both got tired of the impact the programs were having on system performance and switched to BitDefender.  I switched first and I liked it but when Kathie tried to switch her two desktop PCs and her laptop we encountered shocking trouble (documented here).  She approached tech support and not only did it take days between submitting an inquiry and getting a reply, it was obvious that they didn’t have a clue what was going on.  It was time to dump that software.

I them moved onto Sophos Antivirus.  This isn’t available to consumers only businesses but I get a complimentary journalist’s license that I can use on 5 PCs – and I use it!  I love Sophos Antivirus because it just sits on my PCs and works and if they had a consumer product I’d have no hesitation recommending it.  It’s a program that doesn’t feel the need to show you that it’s there all the time.  It just waits quietly for malware and when it sees some, it deals with it.

Kathie has switched to Kaspersky AntiVirus and she highly recommends it.  I’ve tried it too on test machines and find that it’s a lightweight, no-nonsense app.  This antivirus package is quite simple to use and doesn’t bombard you with message and prompts all the time.

However, I’d encourage out to take any AV program for a test before paying for it.  Download a trial, try it out and see what you think before paying.  That way you’re less likely to run into problems.

If you do choose Kaspersky, as a PC Doc reader I can offer you a coupon that'll give you 15% off!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 22:11 and is filed under Questions from Visitors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.