some food for thought lol..

[Julian]

I always used windows defender and pretty much this article sums it up.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/02/01/1334219/google-chrome-engineer-says-windows-defender-the-only-well-behaved-antivirus-cites-tons-of-empirical-data

Feel free to leave your comments I enjoy reading the different opinions of antivirus programs.

[Samson]

Hi Julian, good to see you back here 

I am of the opinion that most third party AVs are basically a protection racket, based on escalating users' fear. They all seem to have embarked on "an arms race" to add as many features as possible to their security suites to convince users of their efficacy. I think that I have seen more issues caused by third party AVs in friends' and relatives' machines than viruses or malicious software, regardless if these are free or paid for solutions. The business model relies on user inertia and auto renewal.

I know that the plural of anecdote is not evidence, but.... I still use XP, an old version of Avast (free) with just the File Shield and Sandboxie...I have never been infected, no viruses, malware, PUP nor toolbar....Just saying

[Boggin]

I've been a Norton user since I went online in 2010 and have it on three laptops, but having read the link I'm tempted to go for WD on my two Win 10 laptops but not sure what I would then use on my remaining Win 7 laptop.

I'm not overly keen on Avast Free or AVG - Comodo has a freebie but I think that carries adware.

I had considered Panda once but read some negative comment about it.

Over the years Norton has blocked a few Toolkits but has also blocked legit program downloads and recently on one machine, kicked out the .exe for WR.

Had to go to Symantec to get them to White List it.

I've since removed it from the white list without a reoccurrence, so it must have just been a buggy definitions update.

[Julian]

@samson
I agree

I am of the opinion that most third party AVs are basically a protection racket, based on escalating users' fear. They all seem to have embarked on "an arms race" to add as many features as possible to their security suites to convince users of their efficacy.

@boggin
Any of my customers that get malware infected on their computer after i clean it up And they ask me what antivirus they should use i tell them windows 10 comes pre loaded with an amazing antivirus tool. i recommend them to run adwcleaner. twice in safe mode then if the second scan comes up with nothing. usually means it's clean but after that if they still feel like they are infected i tell them click start> settings gear>update & security>windows defender> scan offline. it will reboot your computer into a basic state only enough to run windows defender and scan objects so nothing can get in the way. that has saved me so much time teaching people that because it's one of the amazing features in 10 that you don't see or really hear about.

[Boggin]

I've dumped Norton on one machine today because I was wondering if it was the cause of IE browsing problems but it also screwed with my update to 3.9.25 on two machines.

I'm now running WD on that Win 10 machine but had to scan three times with it before it got the message I had scanned for it to stop giving me a notification that WD needed to scan my computer.

I may just stick with WD on that laptop but still have some work to do on it.