What's generally considered to be the best antivirus util for WinXP? My subscription for Norton 2004 just ran out and I don't fancy spending £20 to renew it... is there a reliable free antivirus app out there? The less intrusive the program is, the better - I switch off auto-scanning anyway...

personally - Kaspersky AV is the best solution outa there ....
version 5 is nice although its GUI made for noobs and very less setting avalable ... I have realtime disabled all the time, too
when I want to scan I rightclick the folder / file and do a scan ...

but bitdefender is also a good choice ... its based on the KAV engine and is on demand only ... and free
for money u get a realtime scanner, too but .... u know
http://www.bitdefender.com
http://www.kaspersky.com

AVG Free Edition, it's free and very good.

http://www.grisoft.com <--to download

i found Kaspersky to slow my system down to a crawl.

I got Avast antivirus instead, and it runs excellent.

McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i

My choice, best i've used so far!

http://www.networkassociates.com/us/prod...&cid=10355

just run the monitor part, takes very little resources.................
Kaspersky that is!

best would not to have any antivirus software at all...
But, having in mind that you are working on a M$ system, i would say that AVG combined with a good software firewall, like Kerio PF, should be good enough, without taking too much ressources!

The only antivirus from Symantec that is really good, is the Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition! Latest versions are something like 9.x.x.x.

I am with El_Coyote on this one,
Kaspersky PE v5 slowed my pc down to a crawl and just as he has,i have returned back to the old faithful avast 4 (Freeware Version) and have not had a problem since.
Cotty59uk

Norton AV-2005 Rocks :finger:

http://www.symantec.com/nav/nav_9xnt/

I wonder how so many people can say their A/V software is good. How do you know that your software really does its job? Can you be absolutely sure that it finds every virus, trojan or worm? I think a single person cannot judge the quality of such a software product. You use a specific software, get no system crashes or slowdowns and don't get viruses either. But does that automatically say that your software is good or even better than other software? And what does "software xy slows my system down" (obviously a bug) say about the quality of identifying malicious code, which is the most important aspect in my opinion? Nothing at all.

By the way I use BitDefender Free Edtion because of the simple reason that somebody I trust recommended it and it doesn't screw up my system. I think that applies to most people here, but as I said, it says nothing about the quality and effectiveness of a product.

thats totally right ...
the numbers of viruses are useless anyway ...
nobody will ever get more then xx different viruses anyway ..
there are 10 to 20 common bodies floating around ... and the rest are ones just written to be blocked ... yes actually ppl. do that ... they write viruses then snd em to AV software makers

but the important thing here is the way a software works ... that same question why is firefox better then IE .... both will display a webpage the same way (in most cases) ...
its the surrounding

lets take NAV for example ... its simple ... its yellow ppl. like it because its yellow and well known ...
but on the other hand you see 1. lots ... really lots of useless background services
and we had a LAN party some time ago where it was duty to update AV and make a full scan .... oh lots of things found there ( OMG ) but huh ? how does it come that NAV did say ... hey I am unable to remove some things ... but does not show where when and most important what

many more things to name here and there ...
the engine and GUI are most important not the one taht has the most entries in database
the user should have the control ... over any thing done to his PC ... and this is not the case in any norton product and many more to name ... installing things that you never use or never need
oh, not to forget .... I dislike this about the new KAV 5, too !

in the end the biggest virus is the user itself ... he does the most harmful things to the PC ...
many many ppl. don't have a clue about the PC ... even those who think they do ...
I have seen PC that were stated to be clean and perfect and right after 5minutes I can "smell" malware of any case ... in 95% I am right by doing a scan with Ad-Aware and KAV ...
its just a shame ...

last point ... what was it ?
15% of all US ppl. can be cheated with fishing mails ... just look at the number ... thats just :roll:
those ppl. don't need AV software they need to be disconnected from any external data

Absolutely. Normally a A/V program wouldn't be necessary at all. The biggest problems are users who cannot distinguish between fake and genuine software. It starts with ads on many websites that look like operating system messages. It's also a very hard task to download software like no-cd cracks. "Hey, where can I get those cracks which allow you to play without the CD?" - "Just visit <insert crack site here>". When you are not familiar with such sites you don't only get a crack, but 9 other malware programs, too. The world wide web can really be like a dangerous spider web.

I think if people learned how to use their computer in a proper manner, then most software like anti-spyware tools or virus scanners got pretty useless. Imho that's not too much to demand. People have to realize that their behaviour in the "virtual world" can have real consequences, for example when you have to pay for a dialer or when someone stole secret documents from your computer, or just when you lost data that was important to you. In real life most people can defend themselves against scammers and such, but in the virtual world most people don't invest enough effort to protect themselves. It's always easy to install a bunch of so called security tools. But they are never totally secure with it because of the simple fact that they don't know whats going on. When a person grows up it learns how to "not talk to strangers" and so on. The same thing must apply to the internet.

That's the reason why I only use software I really need. For me that means a basic software firewall (SP2 integrated) and an on-demand virus scanner that allows me to scan files that could have malicious code inside. I also avoid to use the Internet Explorer and only view emails in plain text format. I thinks my system runs much better this way than with various software installed that constantly scans the memory, transfered data and all accessed files.