I unfortunately saw the article on Symantec's 360 application package, and was wondering if the show has ever, or if it will ever, do articles on the FREE products that work out there, that are as easy to use as Norton's (and other mainstream packages), but don't have issues. Examples freely available are things like Avast, AVG, Kerio, various spyware tools etc?

Norton's has for too long been touted as the be all and end all of AV for so long it's gotten retarded. As a systems engineer, network administrator and server administrator the pain I have had to go through to FIX problems caused by programs like Norton's considering their cost (especially in a corporate environment) is retarded.

There ARE however also much better viable commercial applications, but I don't think this is a platform (or dare I say forum) for me to wax lyrical about any of them.

I would just like to see people being given an INFORMED choice as to alternatives out there.

Avast for example on the AV front kicsk Norton's in the shin and the butt on several accounts. One of the main ones being that it has a DAILY update to Norton's WEEKLY one. Also, the footprint MEMORY iwse of Norton's applications has lways been a major pain, considering in the past I have seen Corp AV 9 take over 50% resources on a system. And still there was 1000+virii on the network with it updated.

Nortan should be sued for providing misleading information to its customer!

No, sales people who blindly read the propaganda and sell it to unsuspecting people should be sued, Norton's designers should be put against a wall and shot. Twice.

McAfee isn't any better.

In fact, I think McAfee and Norton are conspiring to make your PC inoperable.

That may very well be true.

Personally on a commercial level - Sophos is the hands down winner. I won't go into it - but it's licensing, technical and support models out strip ANYTHING norton's can do!

Guys - please outline your favourite security tools list, love to get a comprehensive response from each of you on your 'best security programs that are free or cost $$$'. We're putting together next series ideas now so list away.

Personally, I swear by AVG. I bought a license (that will expire in about a week) for it, and consider it money well spent. It's not intrusive, it does the job, it doesn't flog your system (though obviously during major scans the HDD gets a working over), and it's dead simple to use. A couple of clicks in an very intuitive interface, and you can disable things like email scanning, and put off your next full disk scan for a few hours, so you can play games without getting halfway through a level and find your computer is suddenly suffering because it has to make room in it's schedule for scanning.

Ad-Aware SE and SpyBot have also got me out of tight spots!

dont know much of the technical stuff but i use AVG and havent had any problem with my computer since. while all the other time ive been using norton every once a year id have to re-formatt my computer to get rid of all the crap downloaded without my knowledge

I have ZoneAlarm Pro (http://www.zonelabs.com.au) for my firewall and I use NOD32 (http://www.nod32.com.au) for my antivirus.

I haven't had an infection in months now.