World's Best Anti-Virus Just Got Better

Symantec Norton 360, 2008 edition, is the world's best and most popular anti-virus and Internet security software. It now uses 1/4 the amount of memory as previous editions and runs considerably faster as well.

I have used AVG Free Anti-Virus and got annoyed with the intrusive pop-up messages whenever it does an update. I would be typing something in Microsoft Word and then all of a sudden, my system starts beeping madly with each keystroke. Turns out AVG popped up a message saying it had done an update, press the OK button to continue. All my keystrokes that should have gone into Word instead went into the OK button, which beeped because they were the wrong keys. Arrgh! Why can't they just do the update and not tell me about it? It was so stupid and happened so often that I deleted AVG.

I have also used the free PC Tools Anti-Virus which has a "Smart Update" which is not very smart. It pops up a message in the right corner of the screen saying an update is available, but most of the message is immediately hidden by a Windows security message saying PC Tools is not up to date. The Windows message goes away after a few seconds, and about 1 second later, so does the PC Tools message. There is no time to click on it. Then the PC Tools icon stays grey, indicating that it is not up to date. Well, come on, you just told me the update was available, why didn't you download it? Instead, I have to open PC Tools, click on Update, watch the update window appear, click OK to download, then OK again to get rid of the damn thing. Not very smart, but you get what you pay for.

Worse, one day I did a full system scan with PC Tools and let it run in the background. When I checked it a couple of hours later, it had deleted over a hundred files that it said were infected with a virus. Now I know there is no virus because I scan frequently. I did a Google search on the error message and sure enough, it was a "false positive"; that is, PC Tools recognised something that was not actually a virus. The PC Tools web site said yes, they did a boo-boo, download the latest update, which I did, but it did not fix the error.

So I switched back to Norton. The 2008 edition is what it should have been 5 years ago. It runs fast, takes less memory, and has silent updates. Yes, you have to pay an annual subscription, and yes, it costs money to get started, but like I said before, you get what you pay for.

Free stuff is sometimes not worth the price.

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