Alternatives to Norton Internet Security?

Hey guys, my subscription to NIS ran out and I thought I'd try alternatives. The program worked OK for me and saved my butt on a couple of emails with virus attachments but the program is very intrusive and resource hungry. I am looking for a small unintrusive anti-virus/firewall that does the job. I downloaded the trial version of Zone alarm pro w/anti virus and it seemed to fit the bill but it has caused my system to lock up twice so it's coming off. The system is not frozen but when I click on something it won't open up and I'm forced to reboot the pc. It usually runs ok for awhile before this happens. It is version 5.x and Cnet gave it high ratings but user ratings told a different story about how buggy it was and 4.5 was better. Anyhow are there other alternatives to NIS that are small and not intrusive but do the job?

Zonealarm Pro for firewall and real-time attachment-scanning

Mcafee Viruscan for general virus protection

SpyBot S&D for real-time and forensic spyware scanning

I'm currently using the free version of ZoneAlarm with no problems and AntiVir Personal Edition which is completely free for my antivirus.

I used to have Norton AV and also tried out Avast and AVG (two other popular free AV's). I found that AntiVir used the least resources of any of these and Norton used the most on my P-III/Windows ME box. Performance was about equal with Norton missing the most bad stuff. (Never install & run more than one AV at the same time - bad things will happen.)

If you do use AntiVir, the only caution I would give you is to choose the "Detection level low" option under "Heuristics" (setting I am using) or choose the disable Heuristics option. I find even the medium level to be "too strong" resulting in a lot of false positives.

If you go to www.pricelessware.org, you can get links to all of the above and advice on other neat freeware programs (which all have to be adware/spyware free to make their list).

Hope this helps,
Pat

I use ZoneAlarm for firewall and AVG from Grisoft for antivirus. Both are free and work well.

I will agree with both treek13 and Tree on this. The free versions of AVG and Zone Alarm are very good choices. Throw in Spybot Search and Destroy (per PhotonWrangler) and you will be well protected.

Here's a page where I keep links to free software. It doesn't have ALL the best free software (obviously), just a nice little collection of stuff I have put together.

My free software picks.

If any of the links are broken, or go places they shouldn't please let me know.

Mike

Uninstalling and reinstalling Norton Internet Security should reset the subscription for virus definitions.

I use the Look N Stop firewall right now along with NOD32 antivirus, although when windows XP SP2 goes RTM I plan to reformat and use symantec antivirus corporate edition version 8.

No, it doesn't, it "remembers". Maybe it hides a key in the registry or something to that effect.

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stockwiz said:
Uninstalling and reinstalling Norton Internet Security should reset the subscription for virus definitions.



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geepondy...
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