[OU] AV programs & Opera

[Katrina Knight]

At 07:52 PM 04/30/2009 Sogn Mill-Scout wrote:
>We have Norton, and until recently had McAfee. We are not 
>satisfied with Norton, especially after the way we were treated 
>by their "support" people. We're thinking of returning to 
>McAfee,but have some reservations.

I'm a computer consultant. People call me and tell me all their 
computer troubles and I try to fix everything for them. I 
commonly see computers running up-to-date McAfee software that 
have serious problems with viruses and other malware that most 
AV programs detect so I can't recommend using their products. 
The commercial versions are somewhat better than the free 
versions that some ISPs give out, but I don't trust them either. 


>Among other considerations (installation problems/complexity 
>and cost of tech "support" for example), we are wondering about 
>Opera vis-a-vis anti-virus software. Opera has been running 
>fine since the Dell people seemingly cleaned up the malware 
>last Sat. - something the Norton people had been unable to do a 
>week earlier when they finally got 360 v. 2 working. It 
>detected nothing, then things deteriorated. We wanted v.3 but 
>were told it wouldn't run on this computer and we'd have to 
>settle for v.2.

Why won't v.3 run on that computer? If it won't run, other AV 
programs may have issues as well, which could change what people 
would recommend for you.

>All this tedious blah-blah by way of asking if there's any 
>consensus among Opera users as to the best AV programs. The 
>concern about Opera in particular is because both Norton and 
>McAfee seem to discriminate against Opera. They both install 
>toolbars in both IE and Firefox, but there is no indication of 
>their presence or protection in Opera. This makes us nervous 
>because we prefer Opera (although we use IE for a few things). 
>Opinions are appreciated. We're inclined to ditch Norton and 
>are torn between McAfee and AVG.

My preference is strongly for AVG in most cases. What do you 
want to use the toolbars for that not having them makes you 
nervous? In my experience, people don't use them for anything. 
You don't need them to be protected.

-- 
Katrina Knight
kk1raven at gmail.com