Best Virus Protection / Firewall software

[tomneal]

My current subscription is up.
I need to upgrade two pc's.
Any recommendations?

[i8godzilla]

I like CA Technologies (formally Computer Associates). They cater to the corporate client, however, they have a Home Office offering. Most of their virus protection products include license keys for three computers. It has served us well and we have not had issue in the five plus years we have used it. Install it, configure the options (updates, complete scans, etc....) and forget it.

It also plays very well with Mozilla Firefox and Open Office. This is important as I am not much of a Microsoft Application fan.

[anygunanywhere]

the 360 is a nightmare.

Yes. It is.

I am not renewing it.

I too am looking for something else. I have a registry repair that does a good job.

Anygun

[tomneal]

I have AVG now. (Or I did until it expired 2 days ago.)

[dicion]

General Knowledge and Safe Surfing habits are the Best Defense against viruses & malware.

[rbftfire]

McAfee

[OldSchool]

For Windows, we use Avast! for virus, ZoneAlarm Basic for firewall, on all of our home machines for several years now. Both are reliable and free. We have had to pull Norton/McAfee off of computers at home (and most folks would like to at my work), because there is a significant slowdown of the machines.

[10Shooter]

I am an IT Manager for a Law Firm and I just switched us to Kaspersky Internet Suite, which is what I recommend now to my friends and side-job clients and am running myself.

[wstj]

I have been using AVG Free Version for the past 6 or 8 years. It have caught everything that has come along and I have 6 computers at the house, all running it. Another free download is a piece of software from IOBIT called Advanced System Care. Run that a couple of times a week and it will keep the spyware at bay and clean up the registery. Good basic protection and its free.

Wesley

[RPB]

I used to use AVG, then ran AVG and AVAST together for several years, Avast seemed to protect better, so I removed AVG.

Zonealarm free has always been a good firewall, but due to using a remote program, such as LogMeIn, I switched a lot of computers to Comodo firewall and used Avast.

I only switched from Avast due to having to re-register each year, which some people I built computers for couldn't seem to do, even though it was free.

Then I used Comodo Antivirus and Comodo security suite.

Nowadays I use Comodo in conjunction with Microsoft's, (but CA and Kaspersky have always been good too)

A friend I grew up with works as a programmer at McAfee, it used to give a lot of false alerts, can't comment on current program.
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Typically now I go with:
Spywareblaster, by javacool software
Comodo firewall and antivirus
Spybot search and destroy
and on computers I make or set up for other people, Microsoft Security Essentials, in addition to the above.

Of course also there's the "click Start, Run, MRT" Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool; updated monthly through Windows Update.

All free. (But the free spywareblaster you have to manually update, they charge for autoupdate)

Also at the end of each web browsing session and before any restart/shutdown, I use CCLEANER ... (you'd be surprised about that which is not a virus, but which can do things upon your next startup can do)
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Of course "In the beginning," I used to just remove viruses trojans etc manually and post how to do it to others needing help on Microsoft's NNTP groups "forums" (Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) before forums were on the Web) because until IBM finally released an antivirus program, many of us didn't trust antivirus programs to do a good job, or even not to install some other thing ...

[MrBalll]

Like others I will recommend Avast and Zone Alarm.

[dlcrouch]

Comcast furnishes Norton Security Suite as part of their ISP service - not my 1st choice, but the latest version runs well under Win 7 on an I5 powered laptop.
MSE is not bad for a free product.

[OldSchool]

I will still hold to my earlier recommendation, except there is one virus that those cannot possibly defend against: Windows Update.

Had another hard drive trashed by the WU virus Tuesday night, and spent last evening converting that dual-boot machine completely to Ubuntu. That was indeed the last straw.

[tomc]

I've been using ESET NOD32 Anivirus/Antispyware on recommendations from some of my ISP provider business friends. It is much much faster than my old Norton program was and ts much less intrusive into your system operation times. I've been very pleased.