Symantec is WORTHLESS

[punkncat]

What a bunch of CRAP.

I recently had to clean up a friends computer from a really bad virus attack. I went in and completly reformatted the hard drive, wiped it clean, and did a reinstall of winblows.
I installed Symantec's Endpoint Protection to try to keep it clean. I cannot believe just how screwed up this computer is with virus and trojans, AGAIN.
It is as if the program was never even there.

Time to go Check Point Security on this biznatch.

[devildog]

http://www.free-av.com/

free, works great, and not a system hog.

[Coralis]

Lol you gotta love the banner ads on this site sometimes ... here is a thread about symantic and the banner ad is for a competitors anti virus

or it was when i wrote this

[skife]

yeah, AVG for virus remover

[Eagle]

I used to swear by symantic, but then i bought a version a couple years ago, and I had to register it online to get it to work. Well, ever couple of weeks it would ask me to re-register. After a few months of this it said I had registered it to to many different computers and would no longer work. After emailing back and forth with tech support for a few days I just said screw it and uninstalled it.

[jenarelJAM]

Symantec is only still in business because they have a deal with various companies to ship new computers with 1-month free trials of Norton Antivirus. The average consumer hears that they need virus protection and just chooses to renew what's already installed instead of buying something that works.
Norton antivirus is such a resource-hog, and it really doesn't work. Most other anti-virus programs, free or not, will work much much better, and nothing else compares to it's immense resource draining capabilities. Uninstall. Your computer will run better with something, anything, else.

[Ruler_Mark]

use a non mainstream browser. never download anything "free". Or setup a ghosting system

I recommend opera.

[Looper]

use a non mainstream browser. never download anything "free". Or setup a ghosting system

Excellent recommendation Ruler_Mark.

May I recommend VMServer www.vmware.com, it's free. Once you have your virtual machine built the way you like it you should configure it for Non-Persistent mode. Non-Persistent mode will not save any changes when the Virutual Machine is rebooted.

I use VMWare's enterprise product, ESX Server, at my employer and have over 30 virtual machines running on one Dell 2950 Dual Quad Core CPU's and 32GB of RAM. I currently manage 26 ESX Servers and we are adding more.

The main problem with all virus software is it works in a reactionary mode. They create signatures (definitions) from know viruses but can not protect you from the NEW ones until they have it in the lab and build a signature for it.

Staying clean of virus, spyware and nasty stuff is a multi prong approach another thing I could recommend is to looking into modifying your hosts file. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm I like the "HostsMan" product linked on that page but there are others or you can do it manually.

[punkncat]

use a non mainstream browser. never download anything "free". Or setup a ghosting system

I recommend opera.

Lol, I have to laugh a bit at how uninformed a lot of people are. I mean I know little to nothing about the real deep dark techy computer stuff, but I am still savvy enough to do what I consider basic operations and keep my systems healty. I administer my home system (I know big deal right) made up of five computers networking and system maintainance. My daughter who is 15 keeps me on my toes. It amazes me how much these kids know about computers. She is always breaking out new proxies, hacking into admin settings, has even hacked into my router. Now given it was routinely simple password protection and in the case of the router I was only using a wep key, easy enough to work around.
Anywho, I really could not tell you what this user is doing to get in so much trouble with this machine. I have a very similar machine that I am running the same av program on and have had ZERO problems. On my machines that really count I am running Check Point Zone Alarm. It kicks butt. I am going to install Firefox and see how that works out.

[Steelrat]

The guy is either downloading a lot of crap off of PtP networks or downloading a lot of free porn.

[chafnerjr]

Trend micro

On windows (my least favorite OS) I run trend micro's sysclean engine... It's a better version of their PC-Cillin product thats used in the corporate arena and it's free... the catch is that you have to run it manually, and download the updates manually.

The big issue is the spyware, which may have caused your issue in the first place (no I am NOT defending Symantec). Anti-Virus software is just that Anti-Virus... though it may seem to be a game of... heh... semantics... sorry, had to... Viral attacks are much more rare than they once were. The main issue today is spyware, and adware (I include bot's in these)... with Trojans and worms sometimes covered under AV software...

AdAware from lavasoft and Spybot (Google it, I forget who has this now). Are two great free anti-spyware programs...

As a side note, if you run Windows right now It's just going to be a fight. Don't use IE, and keep up to date with your definitions... or just switch to the Mac as I prefer.

[Looper]

or just switch to the Mac as I prefer.

You should do that... Because as soon as the MAC OS takes off with more users, the hackers / spammers will start writing more viruses for them. You can not hide from these things by switching OSs, Browsers or virus software. Those that do not learn how to surf safely are doomed to be infected and no amount of software on ANY OS platform will protect the uninformed from Social Engineering.

[Hilltop Customs]

http://www.free-av.com/

free, works great, and not a system hog.

I'm with devildog.....ive used that free antivir for years now....even uninstalled symantec as soon as I bought a new comp and installed avira antivir. I have it on 5 different computers now(and a bunch of friends comps), and havent had any problems(i use a lot of freeware, torrents, and other stuff too ) Used avira with vista and xp without any problems.

Spybot search & destroy is installed on a few of my computers also.

PS IDK how many people still use limewire, but that program eats computers for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I use to use it for my file sharing in the past and it was ok at first, but something changed and it started devouring memory on any computer I installed it on. Now i stay clear of limewire.

[Hexis]

You should do that... Because as soon as the MAC OS takes off with more users, the hackers / spammers will start writing more viruses for them. You can not hide from these things by switching OSs, Browsers or virus software. Those that do not learn how to surf safely are doomed to be infected and no amount of software on ANY OS platform will protect the uninformed from Social Engineering.

Lack of market share is only one of the aspects protecting OSX from the malware issues that Windows "enjoys". Apple has done a very good job of staying ahead of the curve with patches and features. The unix systems have a lot of inherent advantages over the legacy Windows core.

The social engineering attacks require a lot more user ignorance on OSX. Even as an administrative user you are running as a normal user all of the time. You temporarily elevate your privileges for an install/update (think a GUI version of sudo). Having a program prompt for user credentials can really make even a mildly educated user stop and think about what they are doing. Sure it's possible to combine a series of attacks to run a bit of code in an unprivileged state, then use a privilege escalation attack then putting some sort of malware on the system. It's a possible attack, but at this point not observed in public.

[chafnerjr]

I'm glad you jumped in with the UNIX bit. Many people don't know that the Mac OS is a BSD UNIX system which gets attacked all the time in other avenues.

I give the same advice to Mac users as I do Windows users when it comes to browsers... DON'T USE THE ONE THEY GIVE YOU!!! That goes for both IE and Safari... though I do actually like Safari as opposed to IE which is the electronic equivalent of a bastard 6 year old that was taught to accept candy from strangers. One way or the other Safari is responsible for almost every OS X vulnerability I know of... which is few.

@ Hilltop... fantastic point about limewire... any of the major P2P clients (torrents are different in this argument) are huge gateways for crap to get onto your Windows machine 9even without help from the user)... though at a min. of $75/hour to fix your stuff I should start recommending that program JK

P.S. long live Mozilla!