AVG antivirus- any good?

[tissy]

Now I have a Mac, I don't need any of this sort of thing on my laptop, BUT dd has my old PC and Norton antivirus is about to run out. In addition to it taking up loads of space and memeory, it costs a lot? Was thinking of uninstalling it, and going for a free antivirus programme. Is AVG any good? Dd doesn't send/ receive emails, just browses, mainly cbeebies and Barbie websites

we've always found it ok, we also have spybot search and destroy and adaware (free downloads)

Yes excellent, much much better than Norton. Norton slows your PC down and in tests apparently AVG is just as effective at dealing with viruses.

good

we have AVG very good.

It's fab. I spent a fortune over the years renewing my Norton and didn't realise there was a programme as good - if not better - for free.

Ackchewerly, when we had a bloke in to repair our pc, he took the Norton off and put AVG on because he said that Norton was actually causing some problems on it.

even better....

yes,its very good.it must be cos dh has put it on my pc and he's very clued up about such things(for reasons i wont go into)

Hey Tissy - just because you have a Mac doesn't make you immune from viruses. As Macs are becoming more common outside of creative departments and their market share is growing you can bet the various virus/malware writers will start to take advantage. Concept viruses exist as do 'in the wild' ones. www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan_osx_dnschanger.shtml

Better to be protected before you catch something.. ;-)

It's wonderful and free!! what more can you ask for....also chuck on Ad-aware and spy bot - if you are running Vista the new Windows firewall is not half bad too, far better than the old one that was as much help as a choc teapot!

We have it. 'Tis great. No problems.

Norton is so dreadful it should probably be counted as a virus. I much prefer Kaspersky.

"Hey Tissy - just because you have a Mac doesn't make you immune from viruses."

I would never say never, but OS X is about ten years old and there's not yet one virus for it, not one. The thing you link to is a trojan, and that sort of malware does exist. If you give something permission to run on your machine it can do all sorts of bad things. But that's not a virus, it can't spread on its own, it needs you to do something.

"As Macs are becoming more common outside of creative departments and their market share is growing you can bet the various virus/malware writers will start to take advantage. "

Macs are not secure because they're obscure, they're secure because the OS is much more secure from the ground up than Windows (for example) is.

"Better to be protected before you catch something.. ;-)"

No, there really is no need right now. The only people pushing for Mac users to have anti-virus software are the people who sell the software.

However I would never say that they're totally immune.

So keep an eye out for system updates and listen for news of the first Mac virus, because when one does finally hit it will be big news.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free, surprisingly unobtrusive and even reasonably effective.