Kaspersky and don't even consider anything else (unless it's McAfee or BitDefender) and if you've got Norton, throw it in the bin, or give it to someone you don't like.
Ad-Aware, great product, love it, unfortunately it's standalone and on-demand only. Spybot S+D? don't use it myself but again a perfectly good product. AVG, good anti-virus (and free!) but not updated enough on the free version, and, plonker users won't bother to configure it properly, even if they bother to d/l it. And I've known people turn it off "because the thing I downloaded off the internet said to..." (dancing pigs usually) Avast I've never tried, to be honest, but I'll take your word for it!
AV-Comparatives is the place you should be looking for genuine and objective comparisons, not paid-blurb. You'll note that Kaspersky continually scores highly, 100% detection, 100% inoculation, and although other products like McAfee do almost as well on viruses and scripts, they don't do quite so well at trojans and malware (that's not a criticism, really; when you think about it, a true anti-virus won't necessarily do well against trojans, will it?) However it's trojans and e-mail worms that are the real threat these days, not "classic" viruses.
I have to puff my chest out a bit and say that as regards computer security, i do actually for once know what I'm talkin' bout, Willis; it's by far the biggest part (and headache) of my job as a sysadmin, or supprt monkey would be a better description. Users are complete idiots and will do anything to see a row of dancing pigs or rabbits no matter how many times I tell them not to open dodgy e-mails, "joke" attachments, stupid amusing pop-ups, and not to cancel system warning messages! hence why as part of the recent 2003 Server R2 upgrade/migration, I locked-down almost everyone as a group policy and took away almost all browser and write-to-registry permissions. They hate it, whine consistently, but it keeps them (and my network!) safe(r)
We use McAfee Enterprise over an 80-seat environment, centrally managed by me through Pilot Protection; it's good, catches viruses well, but I'm using a separate tool to check for e-mail, IM, and browser-borne spyware and trojans, and there's still a bit coming through, although nothing like as much as before Tawakalna the Fearless Virus Hunter got on the case. Hell's Bell's, does no-one have any grasp of what's going on but me? I tell people till I'm blue in the face about trojans, remote code execution, zombie networks, phishing and so on and so forth and no-one ever bloody listens. One of these days I will give in and just let them have free reign wit their stupid dancing animals and sit back and laugh while it all collapses round their ears, stupid b*ggers!
We also have a very good hardware firewall (Vigor 3600VG) but I want to either upgrade to the McAfee Integrated suite with anti-spam and anti-spyware, ot migrate 100% to Kaspersky Corporate (which I'd rather do, as Kaspersky is just that much "better" and more controllable - although it slows e-mail down significantly)
At home, I run Kaspersky 6.0 on every machine and believe me, I've tried a lot of AV and anti-spyware products and it's by far the best (although i still fondly remember old Dr Solomons/Magic Bullet- what a joy that product was!) I also run Zone Alarm Pro 6+ on my main machines and craptop, Vindoze Firewall (might as well, doesn't do much except enable uPnP) and I'm behind NAT with a stateful-packet-inspection hardware firewall with proper QoS. My wireless machines are all WPA-PSK protected although i think i might change that to 128-bit WEP and take the performance hit.
I recently tried out BlackIce as a software firewall, it's nay bad at all - but I'm staying with ZA Pro for now as I'm comfortable with it and it's superb at stopping SYN attacks (that's all that TCP flags -s stuff, but sometimes it's legitimate network traffic - check the source and destination IPs)
However, for all this rightfully-paranoid security, I'm stuck with users both at work and home who cannot deal with any other browser but IE. I use Opera, it does such a good job of displaying any site, except Microsoft! and it has slightly more functionality than Firefox, although I heartily commend anyone who does use Firefox or indeed classic Mozilla. If you're using IE, all I can say is don't! it's rubbish! no functionality and riddled with holes that MS keep patching on a weekly and sometimes daily basis - if it was any good, do you think they'd need to patch it all the time? Think about it; it's like using a bucket that's full of holes - why not just use a different bucket?
some people just won't or can't use anything else, so I sadly have to keep IE as default browser for the wife and kids - hence why I need superb AV/anti-spyware/firewall! However I've won the argument re: Lookout Express, which is now utterly verboten at home and at work - although at work they use Lookout in Office Pro, but it's better than OE5/6. Well done those men using Thunderbird! I'm slowly kicking people off MS products onto Open Office/Thunderbird mix, and once we got to our in-house developed apps, all in kiosk mode on browsers, we kinda won't even need Windows except as an o/s, and when you think about it, not at all really! I'd happily get rid of Exchange too and have a Linux-box as a mail-server. Still if it wasn't for MS I'd largely have nothing to do and the Tawakalnistani economy is well supplemented by dozy people who pay me for fixing their disastrously-virus and spyware ridden pcs when they collapse into smoking fragmented corrupted lumps of metal.
As regards P2P - Kazaa, Grokster, WinMX and pretty much all of them - utter rubbish and one of the major sources of computer insecurity and viruses/trojans - if you're going to P2P use a decent BiTorrent client (not BitLord! it's pants) and make sure you've got decent AV and a firewall like ZA running, espeically if you're going to forward your router ports for higher d/l speeds. The child is whining that I won't let him downlaod stuff yet - all his friends do- but all his friends have steaming heaps of junk that were once computers - he has a fast, safe, clean pc.
MSN is just as bad, along with AOL and Yahoo IMs - people should use a decent messenger utility like Trillian. Ever wonder why you hardly ever see me on MSN? because it's an insecure piece of kak! ever watched an MSN-borne virus-script propagate across the contacts list? it's terrifying in it's speed and you have no idea what the script is doing but it looks awful - you totally lose control of your pc and cant even kill the MSN utility. All from clicking on a link to take you to dancing pigs (or rabbits, or whatever.)
The biggest problem with computer security is the users - always have been, always will be - all we can do is try to ensure that they harm themselves as little as possible by as much passive and active security as we can put in, both at point of entry/perimeter and at desktop. Education doesn't work, so that's why we have to lockdown machines, workgroups and domains - because people can't be trusted or relied upon. Does your bank really e-mail you asking you for your password and account details? Is someone from Umboto Gorge really offering you $300 million in diamonds and oil stocks? Does a sexy blonde college student with a night-job as a lap-dancer from Nevada really want a date with you based on an MSN convo you can't even remember?
oh yeh i did have a point before I vented my spleen at the world's incompetent computer users (that'll be erm almost all of them then including my offspring) If you doubt the word of your Mullah that Kaspersky is as good as I say it is, considerest thou this; Kaspersky sold their AV engine, under licence, to Sybari Software Inc. Microsoft recently acquired Sybari in order to incorporate "Sybari's" AV engine into Vista. So Russian software is one of the critical components of MS' great leap forward! makes me smile anyway. Still, knowing that Kaspersky is going to be integrated into Vista makes me a lot more confident about MS' claims for Vista and that, for once, the hype might well be (mostly) true.
Edited by - Tawakalna on 9/16/2006 4:41:20 AM
Fri Sep 15, 2006 12:55 pm 
why don't you nip down to Georgia and compare reformatting frequencies with the Bird-Man?