Keep McAfee or go with Norton??

Download Avast!. It's free and a great scanner.

I have both McAfee VirusScan 2004 (ver. 8.0) and McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 2004 (ver. 5.0) running on the Desktop.

I have both (Symantec's ) Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional and Norton Personal Firewall 2004 running on the notebook.

I strongly recommend Norton Anti-Virus over VirusScan - specifically SystemWorks Professional for addition tools that are included.

McAfee makes the desktop load more slowly. It has a less-well designed user interface than Norton, IMO. It's virus update process is slower than Anti-Virus. It is more demanding upon you and is more intrusive than Anti-Virus.

I would also pretty much say the same for the firewall products. Norton is better than McAfee - and includes very decent IE pop-up blocking capability.

Norton: Yes, 2 thumbs up
McAfee: No.

I would have to agree with using Norton. It is a resouce hog but for the protection you get from it, its worth it.

Tread

both suck nuts

I have never used McAfee, but Norton has never given me a reason to. I think Norton Internet Security is particularly well laid out and easy to use.

Dont forget about Nod32, its a great scanner too. http://www.nod32.com/home/home.htm

Incredibly fast scanner too, dont have to go get coffee while it finishes(unless you want to, which I reccomend.. mm, coffee.)

But yea, i'd really just have to go with the 'personal opinion' opinion here. Try each, decide for yourself, or read some reviews, etc and then decide, but never forget about alternatives to the common scanners, there are a few free, a few cheaper.

Lurius

I'm a NOD32 believer also .. Overall the absolute best AV scanner/software I've ever used.

McAfee=Buggy piece of crap
Norton=Resource hog

You can seriously do much better. If you want a free antivirus, head over to www.grisoft.com and download the free version of AVG. If you want the best of the best, get NOD32 or Kaspersky. BTW, I am a strong supporter of NOD32.

If you want to see a comparison of AVs, go to http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Click on Comparatives on the side bar on the left.
Check out the Online Results for the 2 tests.

You can see for yourself (and these are not the only tests) that Norton is not all its worked up to be.

After using both McAfee (could not get to work) and Norton (too invasive), I found and tried F-Prot. Small footprint, non-invasive, easily disabled during gameplay, and $50 gives me 10 licenses for all my home PC's

http://www.f-prot.com/

im using nod32, and zone alarm pro

after several years, norton and symantec will never be on any machine i own

I'll grant to you that there are other products out there that are better than McAfee and Norton,
BUT,
and this is a big but (as is my butt )
in the business world when you are selling your services to medium and large corporations (and many small companies too), they don't want you to walk in with a laptop running 10 virtual machines, with 5 operating systems, and every tweak known to man. They want safe and stable - and preferrably configured just like what they use or really close to it. This means you should only have the generally accepted applications and developement tools that being used by the businesses you market your services to: Win 2000 Pro/XP Pro, McAfee/Norton, IE, SQL Server/Oracle, MS Office Pro, Outlook, Visual Studio Pro (if you're doing .net), FrontPage/Dreamweaver, and a few others.

If you don't use the software you clients/customers use, or know how to use them then you will lose business and they will hire someone else.

Linux:
If you're going to work with businesses that use Linux, then by all means use dual-boot and create a Linux partition. But the same rules applies. Your Linux partition should only have the generally accepted applications and developement tools that being used by the businesses you market your services to.

I disagree somewhat. What you run on your personnal laptop should have no effect on whatever bussiness you work for. The reason being if they are letting you connect your personnal laptop into their corperate network they are a bunch of idiots. Thats one of the biggest security risks a company can do as there is no way of controlling what someone installs on that computer. Now if its a company supplied laptop then they should be controlling what software is allowed on the computer so there shouldn't really even be any consideration on what to load. Thay should have already made that decision on whats been tested and certified for their network.

well.... It's OK to not agree. What I was saying is that if you are a consultant then your machine is no longer a personal laptop, it is a business tool. When you walk into a client's business with your machine, it can't have funky wallpaper and games visible for all to see. It needs to appear conservative, stuffy, and boring. This is an indicator to the client business that you don't suffer distractions from your work - whether it is true or not. If the client is not comfortable with the manner in which you get the work done, they may not hire you again or provide a good reference for you. It's all a game. They have the money - you want their money - you play by their rules.

I thought we were talking about consumer level stuff. If you want to include the business side of things, fine, Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition is a great antivirus.

WEll i use Norton 2003 Professional edition and Zone alarm Pro 4.5 (V5 sucks a$$). they seem to work fine for me. I never had problem with the setup i have at the moment. so i dont know what the norton haters i here talking about (dont take this comment to the (butthole), I was just want to know y u Guys hate Norton so much).

By the way dont get 2004 it will make ur laptop feel like is a 200 Mhz system.

Another great one is Computer Associates. They used to be free, I think they still have a free version, but the foot print is small, and the interface is clean. Those two things alone make Symantec and Mcaffee look and feel like kludge.

The coporate verison is tedious to set up, but, if you like reading, it is VERY thorough, and you can customize it to the n'th degree. After you understand how it works, apply all the patches, and setup your signature downloads etc. it is pretty much hands free. You can change and apply Policy settings network wide, quarantine computers and all sorts of fun stuff, lock out the user from making changes (mind you most corp. stuff can do that).

I think the main reason is Norton is a severe resource hog and really slows your system down. At least your using version 2003. I can tell you first hand the newer 2004 is horrible and far worse that the 2003 version. I have a license for 2004 sitting here and I refuse to install it back on my computer.

On top of that twice in the past few months Symantec has had a serious security flaw thats had to be patched.

The Corperate version if Norton is a pretty nice product but still not enough to get me to switch over from my NOD32.