Michael wrote:
><<We've been having significant annoyances with =
>Symantec's Norton Internet Security (NIS) for years. >>


Personally, I wouldn't have a bar of any of the so-called "Internet 
Suites".  Nortons/Symantec seem to have been getting worse and worse by the 
year, and have long had a bad reputation. I'm not sure that Mcfee is much 
better.

Judging by various forums, you're far better off with specialised a-v and 
a-spyware programs such as AVG or Avast for antivirus, and Spybot, AdAware, 
Spyware Doctor or Spyware Terminator for anti-malware. Run just one of the 
latter in its active form (I found Spybot a pain in this respect, but good 
as a passive scanner.)

If you don't mind the expense, Kaspersky a-v enjoys an excellent 
reputation, as does Nod32. I have used Kaspersky in the past, and found it 
excellent and very reliable.  I know that many highly-respected technical 
people use Nod32.

Running separate programs will give you much better control over what each 
one is doing than you get by running"total" suites and leaving it to the 
(usually bad) judgement of what the suite thinks you need.

As you've found out by now, when they go wrong, they go horribly wrong and 
take most of your system out with them.

The problem with system "automatic fixit" suites is that they can correct 
problems to a certain extent silently behind the scenes, but when they get 
into a tangle you don't know what they've been doing, so you have no way by 
then of correcting whatever damage they may have done or even of knowing 
what the original problem(s) was in the first place. Sure, there's often a 
log of actions, but most logs are pretty incomprehensible to most of us.

I should add that I don't speak from experience, as I've never used any of 
these full suites, but I speak from my membership of several forums such as 
this one.  The message is almost universal and recurs all too frequently.

Don Penlington
 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html

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