Mick said:
"charlie" ...
I don't care for Norton at all, to say the least!
There is no way that I can tell you that MSE is adequate, however, I use
it on my systems, along with SpyBot. I hope Norton has a clean uninstall
these days.
(That was just one of many of my peeves concerning past versions.)
I agree I was not too happy the trial version was installed, but hoped it
may have now been ok, it seems to take over, I turned backing up off, but it
is still running.
Regarding your newsreader, Mick:
WLM v15+ does not properly quote the cited content from a parent post in
your replies. Notice above that your reply is at the same level hence
jumbled into the reply by charlie.
If you continue using WLM with its lack of proper quoting, either add
yourself the indentation and prefix character in each line for proper
quoting or somehow indicate which was the quoted content and which is
your new content.
Regarding your inquiry, Mick:
PC makers bloat their software inventory by dumping trialware onto their
hosts. Users eventually find out it was bloatware, it expires, and they
have to choose to continue or find something else (and hope the
trialware can be correctly and completely uninstalled). They get the
software for free to bloat the software they claim comes with their
hardware. Symantec knows a percentage of such victims will choose to
continue with the existing product (it's what those users are used to).
With Norton, if you uninstall it, make sure to get their cleanup utility
(I think it's called 'rnav'). That doesn't purge your host of all
remnants of their product but it helps to ensure nothing gets left
behind that still gets in the why (i.e., can generate side effects after
uninstall).
I'd go with Avast Home (free). Better coverage, more infection vectors
are covered, and a sandboxing feature (that's supposed to get much
better in the next version - instead of just auto-sandboxing that you
have to watch out for if enabled, you'll be able to blacklist which
processes always get sandboxed).
Besides rating higher detection coverage at av-comparatives.org, Avast
also rates higher at VB100: the farther up the better the reactive
coverage (what the product detects now with its latest program and
database versions), the farther right the better proactive protection
(what it finds by heuristics), so you want a product that is furthest to
up for best coverage now plus the more rightward it is then the more
likely (but not guaranteed) it will find malware not currently
identified by its signature dataabase.
VB100 RAP (reactive and proactive) ratings:
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/rap-index.xml
Avira is better than Avast but only when you compare the paid version of
Avira against the free version of Avast. Avast, in its free version,
covers more infection vectors than Avira which more than makes up for
the added 1.4% on-demand detection advantage of Avira over Avast. You
can get one of free Avira's features available in Avast (web traffic
monitoring) if you agree to eat some real estate with their adware
toolbar in your web browser (which means that add-on is only effective
when using your web browser, not for other web traffic). Yet I'll grant
that Avira's proactive detection is better than Avast's.
There's no sandboxing in Avira (free or paid versions).
With Avira, you'll have to find out about the workarounds to eliminate
their startup adware banner and also their annoying adware popup window
that appears during signature updates. Avast is adware, too, but you
only see their ad when you open their config UI. One puts ads in your
face. The other hides their ads until you open their program.
MSE has lower false positives than Avira or Avast; however, that's not
unexpected since MSE has less detection coverage than the others. It
can't [false] alarm on what it can't detect.
