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OP
OP
Trevrev

Trevrev

Veteran
Location
Southampton
Thanks for all the advice guys. I've gone for the Microsoft security essentials and comodo firewall.
 
Location
London
ah this is interesting as I need to sort my security in the next few days.

Currently using Kaspersky which I kind of like after years of using Symantec Norton and then getting fed up with it.

Microsoft Essentials sounds almost to good to be true.

I must say that I like the fact that from reviews above it sounds like it doesn't hog resources - Symantec used to get up to all sorts of stuff.

If it's that good how do any folks sell packages?

Any drawbacks at all to it?

Do I have to be terribly good when using it and only visit news, DIY and cycling websites or is it really good enough for all the nasty creatures on the web?
 

Davidc

Guru
Location
Somerset UK
MSE seems to work well. It reports quarantining and blocking stuff that's nasty. Windows firewall doesn't do all I like so I use Privatefirewall 7 for that.

I'm not sure how the paid-for protection gets sold now.
 

shouldbeinbed

Rollin' along
Location
Manchester way
unless you have win7...there are reported issues, and I've had experience of it on my sons laptop

+1 for MSE
No problems at all here with Avast & Win 7. Not tried MSE but have had stuff sneak past AVG on WinXP

OP I'm an Avast fan, I use the inbuilt windows firewall and as a precaution use Malwarebytes to sweep the hard drive once a month. It revived son1's limewired to death PC a few years back and mine when AVG let me down. It's not picked up anything whilst I've used Avast

Filehippo is a good site for free good quality stuff.
 
Location
London
Daft question very possibly, but just thought I'd check knowing Msoft's past.

I never use Explorer as my browser these days.

Always Firefox.

Fair to assume that that will be all dandy with MSE?
 

slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
I'm on Avira.

The last time I tried to install Norton products, it went horribly wrong. Patched in to an expert in Bangalore, he "took control". { It's always creepy seeing somebody else moving their cursor into your PC, isn't it?}.
Over the course of two hours he actually managed to reduce my PC to ashes. And then jump and down on the embers on his next call-back "expert session". No Windows start up, no nothing. He then had the brass neck to tell me that of course he couldn't fix a PC that was already infected with crap that my previous five years of Norton money should have done.
By entire luck, and the local teen wizard at the local corner shop, told me to install Ubuntu and get back My Docs and emails from there onto a memory stick, and then re-install Windows. It worked, and I'm no expert.

Whatever you do, avoid Norton. The software is flabby and slows down your PC. The technical help is utter, utter, utter sh1te.

Revenge, I like it!
 
Location
London
yes I used Norton for many years - I think I switched off auto-updates as I didn't like it hogging things in the background but I used to manually update first thing every morning.
Despite this I think something got through.

I also found that it appeared to be becoming increasingly flabby.

The update was a rip-off as well - you'd think they would give you a discount sweetener as a regular customer but it was always some totally daft price - in the end I went down PC world and got Kaspersky for far less.
 

migrantwing

Veteran
Tried most AV's over the years and, as many others have mentioned, Microsoft Security Essentials is the whole package.
 
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