My Antivirus Odyssey

Well, I’ve had a fun day.  On my laptop, my trial version of NIS (Norton Internet Security) that was pre-installed with the computer was coming towards its expiration date. Since I’m currently running five computers on my network, you can well imagine that I’m not a big fan of having to pay my antivirus tithe every year.  It gets bloody expensive.

The first step of my changing over to different software started with the firewall. In the past I might have gone with ZoneAlarm, but recent reviews and personal experience have shown it to be falling prey to having been on the market for a very long time. I finally settled on COMODO Firewall Pro.  While it can be a little annoying at times, I’m comforted that it is paying attention to the environment. Since I usually try to protect my computers behind a hardware firewall, software firewalls are not usually my highest priority…but a laptop is prone to being in more hostile environs, so the extra protection.

Next step: the antivirus software. There are basically three brands that are used in the freeware realm at the moment: Avast!, AVG, and Antivir. I uninstalled Norton (as you can only have one antivirus running at a time), and I started with AVG as it’s running on desktops around here.  Well…it wasn’t successful.  I just refused to update the database.  Nothing worked.  Grrrr.

Next up: Antivir. This is touted as been the most effective of the antivirus trio I listed. It installed, but I wasn’t able to easily get the configuration screen to come up, I would get dblClick errors, and as with AVG, I couldn’t get an update to download.

Lastly, I tried Avast! Past experience with this software wasn’t something fun, so I wasn’t happy with this choice.  At least I wasn’t until it was the only one that installed smoothly and immediately updated its database.

How in the world do people who haven’t spent their lives with computers cope with the vagaries that are computers.  These machines can be incredibly persnickety.