A4Quattro said:
NOD32 antivirus, can't say enough about it, end of the day it works and I rarely notice it. And trust me I have tried them all.
As for firewalls, the best sort are hardware, I have one on-board my motherboard, and one in my dsl router.
...So YOU'RE the guy who uses nVIDIA ActiveArmour?
I'll let them know I found out who it is!
I run Sygate Personal Firewall on my machine (absolutely fantastic - and free for non-commericial use - however now Symantec have bought the firm (read into that what you will)); but "Sygate 5.6 Download" entered into Google still yields
- I've got the """Firewall""" on my router running too, but lets face it, they're made of cheese and love and not exactly a Firewall in the common sense of the word. I'd have a SonicWall here but they're not keen enough on giving me one for free yet so I'm toying with the idea of putting a Linux box in the wardrobe - but I guess there's no rush until Sygate becomes ineffective.
In terms of Anti-Virus they're all only as good as their database and heuristics (there is one product on the market (to my knowledge) that claims to not rely on this stuff and boasts support of BIG organisations - don't bother with it - I found a bit of a hole in it) - I've tried a lot and have settled on Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate Edition. Everyone rips the pi55 out of Norton Anti-Virus / Internet Security, and IMO rightly so, but Symantec Corporate really is the exact opposite; since running Firefox, Sygate, Symantec Corporate and PC Tools Spyware Doctor (be cautious - there are some fake sites out there for this one) I've never had even the slightest wiff of a problem - and with the spam coming directly to my machine from catch-all email addresses at four domains the setup is regularly tested!
I guess there's no special reason why you should take my advice, but without wanting to be a patronising smart-****, I'd recommend you ditch Zone Alarm and AVG at your first possible chance... If you went looking for a hack for Zone Alarm Pro you'll find that most of the sites you might visit on your quest will find countless articles about how to get around it before they'll actually find a hack for it; and AVG is affectionately known as "Fisher Price My First Anti-Virus" by our boys...
I've gotta say though, the best single move you can make towards decent internet security (if you haven't already) is switching to Firefox. OK it's not impregnable but when you consider that Internet Explorer was vulnerable to attack (ie in need of security patches) for something like 300 days of last year, it's an easy choice to make...
Regards,
Rob.