Yarm Computers Ltd

Oh Which Antivirus Program Do I Use?

In these days of internet fraud and skulduggery, Anti Virus software is an absolute must...some say a necessary evil.  We have all heard of the major players in the Antivirus field, Norton, MacAfee, Kaspersky, F-Secure, Panda etc as well as the freebie versions like AVG and Avast (steer well clear of free Antivirus programs, detection rate is usually low).  You may see every once in a while on TV Norton 360 Internet Security on sale at our high street competitors, which generally means a mini surge in the amount of home computers and laptops we see in for repair.  This surge is not directly as a result of Norton being such a bad program, although it is something we don’t recommend as a security solution to our customers, the problems begin if a customer is changing Anti Virus software and need to uninstall their previous security program. 

Uninstalling security software can be straight forward, and should be.  Just run the uninstall utility either from the Start Menu under the software tab, or from the control panel...but no, alas, as we have seen on so many occasions, uninstalling Anti Virus software can result in many problems from something trivial up to the complete standstill of your PC or laptop.  It makes me laugh that these companies have actually made dedicated uninstall programs for their software...why can't they just include this in the product in the first place, some companies actually charge for these Antivirus removal programs.

 In order to test the Anti Viral market, in terms of who has the best product, every 6 - 8 months we run a series of rigorous tests to put the main contenders, and a selection of unknowns, through their paces and basically whichever comes out on top wins, and therefore earns the right to be unleashed onto our customers with extreme confidence.

Many of our customers know that we used to recommend F-Secure, and still it rates highly in our estimations, but the winner in the past 2 trials in our humble opinion is ESET Smart Security and ESET NOD32 Anti Virus.  In terms of the amount of viruses it picks up, how it deals with viruses and how it affects the speed of your PC (which is a big advantage over the big boys), it won hands down.

We do get the odd customer querying why we change our Anti Virus recommendations, to that we can only reply that we invest a lot of time and effort in providing what we think is the best product for the job to our customers, we recommend it, we support...let’s face it we use it on our PC's and servers, so we know the product inside out. 

Once thing I will say is that there is no Antivirus program on the market which will detect and deal with all Viruses, as when you think about it Anti Virus companies are always one step behind the people who create these annoying viruses.  But on the whole they do a pretty good job, but we think ESET does a better job.