I have a user who is absolutely adamant that he have a good and functional anti-virus program for his laptop. He's been less than pleased with Norton and Virex. Does anyone have a recommendation? He's not concerned with license type. He's happy to buy something if it doesn't completely suck and doesn't slow down his computer (keep in mind though that it should be effective should a viable Mac virus arise). Any suggestions/recommendations are welcome and I thank you in advance for any/all advice.
Best antivirus software (even though we don't need it yet)
- Thread starter jbartlet
- Start date
Thank The Cheese
Registered
The best antivirus app is...Mac OS X 
here is a list of some antivirus apps. But you are right, there is just no reason forthe inconvenience and the system slow-down accociated with anti-virus apps. The only way to prevent an anti-virus from slowing down your computer is to use a non-resident app (one that does not run all the time, monitoring your activity). Considering the extreme low risk to Macs, that would be more than sufficient. All he needs to do is run the scan every night, or only when he is about to send off a file to a Windows PC, and he'll be fine.
I'm not much of a fan of Norton as it is so bloated, but if he just buys the Anti-Virus and not the whole Internet Security package, and turns off the memory resident mode, it should not slow the system down.
here is a list of some antivirus apps. But you are right, there is just no reason forthe inconvenience and the system slow-down accociated with anti-virus apps. The only way to prevent an anti-virus from slowing down your computer is to use a non-resident app (one that does not run all the time, monitoring your activity). Considering the extreme low risk to Macs, that would be more than sufficient. All he needs to do is run the scan every night, or only when he is about to send off a file to a Windows PC, and he'll be fine.
I'm not much of a fan of Norton as it is so bloated, but if he just buys the Anti-Virus and not the whole Internet Security package, and turns off the memory resident mode, it should not slow the system down.
Rhisiart
Registered
I use ClamXav to prevent passing on virii to my PC-driven family members. It's free, although making a donation is the decent thing to do.
Take care with Intego products. Some of their upgrades for VirusBarrier, NetUpdate and NetBarrier degrade system performance. Further upgrades can resolve the problem, only for yet another upgrade to upset the apple cart again.
Curiously, this problem doesn't apply to Intego's ContentBarrier, which I rate very highly.
So far, I've only used Intego for their backup software, but I installed their VirusBarrier to see how creepy it might be. I have to check out all the possibilities before I can advise any of my users to install anything, so I get the lovely job of running a software I'm not interested in for a problem that doesn't yet exist. I installed Intego, and for anyone who's interested, the initial scan of the whole hard drive (80GB) took a whopping 3-1/2 hours. I've chosen to have it scan just my home directory every night. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, I'm checking out ClamXav on another computer. If nothing else, I'll know everything there is to know about Mac antivirus software by the time this is over! Many thanks for the replies, and please feel free to reply if there's something good I've missed.
J
J