And works very well indeed.. I'm running it (Windows Defender to be precise) on my main PC without issues.

i did try it, but i felt my computer was running slower. mind you, i have a 2007 macbook (now considered obsolete probably).

i meant to say sophos for mac. i did try it for a year or so, but it wasn't detecting any mac viruses so i uninstalled it. as i said, my 2007 mac seems to be running smother without it.

aye, kaspersky was very heavy on resources, but i always thought it was the best internet security software. norton seems to be doing fine, not that hungry on resources anymore.

macafee and bit defender are not that great, i'm afraid, and trend micro and others are even worse in my humble opinion.

anotehr good security software is g-data, a german product but not that popular in the uk for some reason. i thought of buying a licence from german's ebay, but in the end got an avg licenece (win xp and leopard - boot camp) for 3 quid on ebay. it was an oem licence, though.

In reply to a post by MrTAToad2:

I'm sticking with Security Essentials - its free...

and a resource hog, it also not that good. i have sorted out a few computers with security essentials on which have let some viruses through, some that it should have stopped.


that is why even if I did end up with windows 8 I would not trust Microsoft security,

I find it a problem on computers with less than 1GB RAM but beyond that the scanning engine is very efficient.

Waste of money. Anti-virus is pretty useless. The focus needs to be on software patching and browser configuration. Chome & FF in interactive plug-in mode = win.

That's a bit extreme, it certainly has a place. Antivirus isn't useless, but it's often misunderstood. If you are fully patched and don't do much web browsing - you may not need it. If you download dodgy content constantly, you definitely need antivirus, but you'll probably still get a virus regardless!

We all know this anyway so there's no point repeating it.

It doesn't matter how secure your OS is, some users will still press "Yes" to the "do you really want to open this 100KB executable video file" - that's not the fault of the OS or browser. Most virus infections are solicited.

Web browsing is generally safe if a system is bang up to date. It can be made even safer if the browser is running in interactive plug-in mode. "Dodgy content", whatever that may be, can be downloaded from legitimate sources.

UAC is there to protect the idiots. Most virus infections aren't solicited. They come in the form of drive by downloads and are often served by legitimate websites after the server has been compromised. The user just has to browse to a website to become infected.

I'm not convinced that is in the majority, if you go to a compromised website you will get some sort of warning from your browser asking whether you want to download said software. If it tried to execute or install itself then you will get a UAC prompt, it doesn't just magically install itself. *

That's solicited in my book....

*Not saying it's impossible, its very unlikely.

There is no warning. Code is executed without the users consent. Everything happens in the background. This is why is it so important that the OS, browser and plug-ins (Java, Flash, Adobe PDF, etc) are kept up to date.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cib-lglB7Vw

500k Mac users were infected a few months ago because Apple took a long amount of time to patch multiple Java vulnerabilities. http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/04/03/mac-malwa...