I know that we covered this a short while ago, but I thought I'd raise it again, for two reasons:

1. My yearly subscription to McAfee (on my desktop PC) is nearly up.
2. I've just installed XP SP2 on both of my Windows boxes, and my laptop's complaining that I don't have any anti-virus software.

So, I figure this is a good time to get some.

Any recommendations? I'm not too bothered about email filtering: I already use ClamAV on my mail server.

I'm tempted to change away from McAfee, since the customer support, the last time I contacted them, was staffed by muppets.

AVG remains free and seems to work pretty well.

I prefer Norton over McAfee, but I'll probably look into AVG once my subscription runs out.

One of the things I've noticed (and like) about AVG is that they cut up their recent update patches into smaller chunks. So if you update frequently, then the newest updates are very short downloads even on dialup.

I second (or third, or fourth) the AVG vote. I've been fixing some people's machines lately, and as far as I'm concerned, Norton and McAfee cause more problems than they solve. Amazingly, the free software is easier to use, less annoying, and less processor-intensive.

And good luck to you folks trying to uninstall the pay programs. Those things are a b#$&% to get off the computer.

All I know is that my roommate used to get viruses all the time, often knowing he was doing something that would result in getting one. He'd get so fed up with all the viruses he'd get that he would reformat about once every two months!! I built him a computer and simply put Ad-aware and AVG on it, and he's been running fine ever since.

AVG is good if you're looking for a free scanner, but if you've got a few bucks to spend, NOD32 is the ultimate.
It's the only undefeated scanner in the Virus Bulletin benchmarks, and in the last set of public tests, it was roughly 20 TIMES faster than Norton or McAfee's flagship products.
http://www.nod32.com/

Tony, I recall you saying you were having problems with AVG geting the auto updates all the time? Does it still behave that way for you?
I set mine to check for updates every morning after 6AM central time and it seems to get a new update almost daily. When I had it set for earlier than that, it would not always get the updates. I don't know if there was/is a big server load in the middle of the night or soemthing totally unrelated, but now it consistently gets updates. It could also be that I added the other servers to the config file for update addresses...

Before, I think it was a combination of two things:

1. A problem at the server end with the updates or the update site being temporarily unavailable.

2. The updates not being set to "re-try in X days" if an update failed.

After setting it to re-try, I think it works OK now.