I agree with MJ about Trend Micro. House Call is a really good, free, program that lets you scan your comp over the internet... so there's no danger of your virii infecting the host computer and not being detected.
We use the business edition of it at work to protect our servers, and since we're talking about millions of dollars of files, drawings, etc, etc, it has to be good.
Having said that, my recommendation would be Nava Shield
http://navashield.com/order/purchas...d=NEUATK2000&license=a97To6w/mtFlOnjGsAORWw== for a number of reasons.
1) Price. Usually about $50 a year, but they run specials so you can get better deals.
2) Robustness. It not only finds virii that have infected you, it seeks out and destroys worms, adware, spyware, registery infections, etc. In short it's a really good program.
3) Proactive shielding of your computer. It's constantly monitoring your internet connection and your computer ports. It closes unused, open ports that are a constant source of internet infections.. keyloggers and trojans love to sneak in on them and take over your computer when it's on and use it to spam adware, virii, etc. NavaShield stops it cold.
4) Anonimity. There's a setting that you can switch on that blocks your IP address from anyone and everyone. So if you visit a site and the site wants to see who you are or where you are it cannot backtrack your IP address to find you. Everything is encripted....useful if you download a lot of music.
5) Ease of use. Load it, turn on the things you want on and off the things you don't want and that's it. It' runs in the background, you usually don't know it's even there... it just works.
I've been using it for a year now, and truthfully, I haven't had to resort to using House Call or any other program since installing it.
Cons: There is one minor annoyance to the program. You cannot set it to scan at a certain time... like 3am or something like that.. it has it's own clock and, while you can turn it off and tell it to scan manually anytime you want, you cannot set an automated
specific time. To me, when I'm playing an online game, that can mean the difference between living or dying if it decides to do a scan while I'm in the middle of a fight. Like I said, it's really a minor annoyance..
All in all I'd give it a 9.5 out of a possible 10.
Note* Norton is Norton in name only. Peter Norton sold the program and the rights to use his name to Symantic long ago.
MacAfee was just bought by Intel... Maybe now they will make a good program?
